The CRU graph. Note that it is calibrated in tenths of a degree Celsius and that even that tiny amount of warming started long before the late 20th century. The horizontal line is totally arbitrary, just a visual trick. The whole graph would be a horizontal line if it were calibrated in whole degrees -- thus showing ZERO warming

Sunday, September 30, 2007

Separating climate fact from fiction

This week is especially challenging for citizens trying to separate fact from fantasy in the climate debate. From the excited rhetoric of United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's high-level event in New York, the pontifications of Ted Turner at the Clinton Global Initiative or politicians pandering for the green vote at President Bush's leaders summit, the public is in dire need of self-defense strategies.

The most reliable tool is simple skepticism. "I don't believe you; prove it" is an appropriate response to Al Gore and his climate campaigners. But such a charge is politically incorrect when applied to climate change so most people need something more passive, a climate change propaganda detector. Here's what will cause alarm bells to ring on a properly tuned detector:

* Activists claiming natural events are unnatural, or normal events abnormal. This guarantees that claims we are seeing more extreme events are always right. The "warmest/wettest/driest/snowiest/windiest" actually means the most extreme in the official record, which for most of the world is less than 50 years. Such a short time interval guarantees records will be set all the time.

* Speculation and exaggeration presented as unbiased fact. It's revealing to compare U.N. and other political pronouncements about climate with the scientific research that supposedly backs them. Conditional words - "could," "may" or "possibly" - that appear in the science papers vanish when the issue becomes political. Ban Ki-moon's assertions in May are classic: "The recent report of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) emphasizes that the science on climate change is very clear, that the warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and that this is happening because of human activities." IPCC scientists concluded no such thing, but the secretary-general's exaggerations draw more attention to his cause.

* Exploitation of basic fears, a common practice well-documented by Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore. Humans are naturally fearful of the environment because they know it can kill them. Animism, the earliest form of religion, revolved around worshipping and placating nature, even at the expense of human well-being. Much of today's environmentalism takes the same tack.

* Taking advantage of public ignorance about science. Mislabeling carbon dioxide as pollution is standard practice for many campaigners and politicians - Sen. Barbara Boxer, California Democrat, has proposed a "Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act" riddled with this deception, and Mr. Gore often refers to CO2 as pollution. "Climate change is real," "The science is settled" and other meaningless but loaded assertions are used to manipulate public opinion by political operatives.

* Continuously shifting goalposts. Initially, global warming fears dominated public consciousness. Then, starting in 1998, the world began to cool while atmospheric CO2 continued to rise in complete contradiction to the theory. So the mantra became "climate change" and any variation could then be attributed to human activities. To avoid addressing the fact that climate change is a natural occurrence on all planets a new goal post shift is occurring; now the phraseology is "dealing with climate chaos."

* Continuously "upping the ante" if concerns do not seem sufficient, making statements everyone eventually understands to be ridiculous. John Ritch, director general of the World Nuclear Association, provided a perfect example in June: "Greenhouse gas emissions, if continued at the present massive scale, will yield consequences that are - quite literally - apocalyptic. ... If these predictions hold true, the combined effect would be the death of not just millions but of billions of people- and the destruction of much of civilization on all continents."

Climate alarmism may defeat itself by simply overplaying its hand. This week's conferences could speed that process, helping end what is becoming the most expensive science swindle in history. Let's hope so.

In 2006, an article appeared in Science magazine reconstructing the temperature of the Northern Hemisphere back to 800 AD based on 14 smoothed and normalized temperature proxies (e.g., tree ring records). Osborn and Briffa proclaimed at the time that "the 20th century is the most anomalous interval in the entire analysis period, with highly significant occurrences of positive anomalies and positive extremes in the proxy records." Obviously, concluding that the Northern Hemisphere has entered a period of unprecedented warmth is sure to make the news, and indeed, Osborn and Briffa's work was carried in papers throughout the world and was loudly trumpeted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that publishes the journal Science.

A recent issue of Science contains an article not likely to receive any press coverage at all. Gerd Buerger of Berlin's Institut fuer Meteorologie decided to revisit the work of Osborn and Briffa, and his results raise serious questions about the claim that the 20th century has been unusually warm. Buerger argues that Osborn and Briffa did not apply the appropriate statistical tests that link the proxy records to observational data, and as such, Osborn and Briffa did not properly quantify the statistical uncertainties in their analyses. Buerger repeated all analyses with the appropriate adjustments and concluded "As a result, the `highly significant' occurrences of positive anomalies during the 20th century disappear." Further, he reports that "The 95th percentile is exceeded mostly in the early 20th century, but also about the year 1000." Needless to say, Gerd Buerger is not going to win any awards from the champions of global warming - nothing is more sacred than 20th century warming!

The reconstruction of past temperatures is a science unto itself, and the library contains many journals dedicated to the field. We could easily locate an article a week presenting a temperature reconstruction from some part of the planet that would call into question the notion that the 20th century was a period of unusual warmth. You may recall many essays we presented over the past five years examining the "hockey stick" depiction of planetary temperature (little change for 900 years, and suddenly 100 years ago, the temperature shot up) so merrily adopted by Gore and many others.

A large and important article appeared recently in Earth-Science Reviews regarding a long-term reconstruction of temperatures from Russia's Lake Baikal. In case you have forgotten your geography lessons, Lake Baikal is the world's deepest lake, it contains the world's largest volume of freshwater (20 percent of the global supply), and the lake has over 300 rivers flowing into it. Anson Mackay of University College London is the author of the article, and he notes that "the bottom sediments of the lake itself have never been directly been glaciated. Lake Baikal therefore, contains a potential uninterrupted paleoclimate archive consisting of over 7500 m of sedimentary deposits, extending back more than 20 million years." If that is not perfect enough, the Lake "is perhaps best well known for its high degree of biodiversity; over 2500 plant and animal species have been documented in Baikal, most of which are believed to be endemic." The Lake is a long way from the moderating effects of any ocean, and therefore, the Lake should experience large climatic fluctuations over long and short periods of time.

The trick to reconstructing temperatures here involves the shell remains of planktonic diatoms that have lived in the Lake for eons. During warm periods, some species of diatom phytoplankton flourish while during cold periods, some species flourish while most reduce production. Cores from the bottom of the Lake therefore contain a high-resolution temperature record for hundreds of thousands of years interpreted from biogenic silica left from the plankton.....

Of greater interest to us is what Lake Baikal can tell us about the most recent thousand years, and in particular, we are interested in the warming of the last 1000 years. Mackay notes that "between c. A.D. 850 and 1200, S. acus dominated the assemblage, most likely due to prevailing warmer and wetter climate that occurred in Siberia at this time." Well now, it certainly looks as if the Medieval Warm Period was noticed at the Lake. Next we learn that "Between c. A.D. 1200 and 1400, spring diatom crops growing under the ice decline in abundance, due in part to increased winter severity and snow cover on the lake, which is reflected in cooler early Siberian summers." The Little Ice Age then hit hard as Mackay finds "The diatom-inferred snow model suggests significantly increased snow cover on the lake between A.D. 1200 and 1775, which mirrors for the large part increases in snow cover in China during AD 1400-1900."

But here comes our favorite set of conclusions. Mackay writes "Diatom census data and reconstructions of snow accumulation suggest that changes in the influence of the Siberian High in the Lake Baikal region started as early as c. 1750 AD, with a shift from taxa that bloom during autumn overturn to assemblages that exhibit net growth in spring (after ice break-up). The data here mirror instrumental climate records from Fennoscandia for example, which also show over the last 250 years positive temperature trends and increasing early summer Siberian temperature reconstructions. Warming in the Lake Baikal region commenced before rapid increases in greenhouse gases, and at least initially, is therefore a response to other forcing factors such as insolation changes during this period of the most recent millennial cycle."

The Lake Baikal study shows that warming has occurred in the most recent century, but it is certainly nothing out of the ordinary and possibly to some degree explained by non-greenhouse forcing. The Osborn and Briffa proclamation that the 20th century was somehow out of the ordinary is certainly not confirmed by the incredible reconstruction from Lake Baikal.

In the food-versus-fuel debate, there's little doubt where Norman Borlaug's heart lies. The father of the "Green Revolution," Borlaug's life has been dedicated to increasing the food supply in the developing world. His work with grains is credited with saving millions of lives, and in 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. So Borlaug, now 93, watches with dismay as ever-greater amounts of the world's grain are turned into motor fuel for developed nations. "It isn't going to solve our energy problems, and it's going to disrupt our food system," Borlaug said Thursday. He stressed that he's not against biofuels, "up to a certain point." But using food as a fuel requires a careful balance, and Borlaug tilts his arms wildly to show how lopsided he thinks the balance has become.....

To increase food production, he advocated whole systems: developing dwarf varieties of wheat, using fertilizers on worn-out soils, battling plant disease and improving food-distribution systems. The results sent grain production soaring in the developing world. By some estimates, 1 billion lives have been saved. In recent decades, the race between the global supply and demand for food - a lively topic in the 1960s and 1970s - has mostly faded from public consciousness. Grain surpluses, not grain shortages, have produced most of the headlines. Global hunger and malnutrition still haunt parts of the globe, but less widely than before, and often because of war, not farming practices.

But Borlaug has never stopped working, even into his 90s. And now, suddenly, old issues like the world food supply are becoming hot topics once again in the public arena. This time, it's because of biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel. The rush to build corn-based ethanol plants is starting to transform agriculture. So much so that, if trends continue, Borlaug's native Corn Belt state of Iowa may soon need to import corn. "Pretty sad," Borlaug said, shaking his head. "In the next two to three years, if things continue to unfold as they are now, the price of meat is going to skyrocket." If that happens, "Then the shoe will be on the other foot," Borlaug said. "The general public has been saying, 'Oh, agriculture has been subsidized for this, that and the other.' "

Yet today's food-versus-fuel debate has a new element since 1970: growing concern about global climate change. Count Borlaug as a skeptic. "I do believe we are in a period where, no question, the temperatures are going up," he said. "But is this a part of another one of those (natural) cycles that have brought on glaciers and caused melting of glaciers?" He's not sure, and he doesn't think the science is, either. "How much would we have to cut back to take the increasing carbon dioxide and methane production to a level so that it's not a driving force?" he asked. "We don't even know how much."

So today a new debate is under way, as the world struggles with the proper balance between food production, fuel production, global hunger and global warming. What would Borlaug do? He'd like to turn back the clock to seek greater investment in alternative energy - fuel from plant waste, sunlight, water and wind. "What we should have done is to spend much more research on many different sources of energy, and we neglected that," he said. "If we have to start with grain, that's very different than starting with wood chips."

The prolongation of the Kyoto Protocol on the reduction of carbon emissions, which expires in 2012, will be ineffective, the head of the Russian hydrometeorology service said. Speaking at the United Nations headquarters in New York, which hosted a one-day summit on climate change Monday, Alexander Bedritsky said: "Samples prove that the Kyoto Protocol is imperfect, and its prolongation in its existing form for the coming periods of cooperation will be ineffective."

The Kyoto Protocol obliges the 35 industrial states that have ratified the document to cut emissions by 5% below 1990 levels by 2008-2012. The United States, a major polluter, has pulled out from the protocol, saying this could damage its economy. Developed and developing countries have been locked in a dispute over who should bear the main burden of carbon emission restrictions.

The head of the Russian federal service added that despite obligations assumed by a number of countries, carbon emissions, blamed for global warming, continue to increase in most industrially developed countries, as well as in countries with developing economies. "The reality of the situation in a number of developed countries does not correspond with the dynamics of assumed obligations on the stabilization and reduction of emissions," he said.

The one-day summit, held ahead of the annual climate treaty conference in the Indonesian island of Bali in December, was attended by representatives of 150 countries, including more than 70 heads of state.

Virginia's state climatologist, whose doubts about global warming and utility-industry funding made him a lightning rod on climate-change issues, quietly left his position over the summer. Patrick J. Michaels, who held the position since 1980, remains as a part-time research professor on leave at the University of Virginia, reported Joseph C. Zieman, chairman of the school's Department of Environmental Sciences, to the Daily Progress of Charlottesville. Mr. Michaels has been a leading skeptic of global-warming theories. Although he thinks global warming is real and influenced by humans, he contends it is caused primarily by natural forces.

The administration of Gov. Tim Kaine, a Democrat, asked Mr. Michaels last year to refrain from using his title when conducting non-state business because of fears his views would be perceived as an official state position. The governor's office said Mr. Michaels, appointed by Gov. John N. Dalton, a Republican, was not a gubernatorial appointee, contending that the climatology office became UVa.'s domain in 2000.

Mr. Michaels, 57, called his resignation a sad result of the fact that his state climatologist funding had become politicized, compromising his academic freedom. "It's very simple," he said. "I don't think anybody was able to come to a satisfactory agreement about academic freedom."

The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and a very detailed critique here for more on the Lockwood paper

Saturday, September 29, 2007

GEOENGINEERING WOULD BE MUCH CHEAPER AND BECOME EFFECTIVE MUCH SOONER

That the warmists insist on the quite impractical and unlikely route of CO2 reduction to achieve their proclaimed ends just shows that their real agenda is not what they make it out to be. It is a tool to make the hated Western society poorer, nothing else. Two articles below:

David Schnare, an environmental scientist and attorney associated with the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, told the U.S. Senate today that a solution to global warming is simple, cheap -- and no more than a few years away.

With geo-engineering, the doctor says, scientists are learning how to replicate natural phenomenon, like volcanic eruptions, to control global temperatures. Here are excerpts from prepared testimony the doctor submitted:

Geo-engineering is the deliberate modification of large scale geophysical processes ... The first of the two most common examples cited is placement of reflective aerosols into the upper atmosphere in order to reflect incoming sunlight and thus reduce global temperature.

The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 injected a significant amount of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, lowering the Earth's surface temperature by about (half a degree) the year following the eruption.

... Because these techniques mimic natural phenomena, we know more about how quickly and well they work than we do about the efficacy of attempting to reduce greenhouse gases. We have measured the effects of the natural processes and can state with considerable certainty, bordering of complete certainty, that they will produce the result sought. Although the effects of greenhouse gas reduction would occur over a period of no less than decades and more likely centuries, the effects of geo-engineering can (and will) be manifest in a matter of weeks after application. ... Geo-engineering is ... 200 to 2,000 times less expensive ... than exclusive reliance on carbon control.

Two of Britain's leading environmental thinkers say it is time to develop a quick technical fix for climate change. Writing in the journal Nature, Science Museum head Chris Rapley and Gaia theorist James Lovelock suggest looking at boosting ocean take-up of CO2. Their idea, already being investigated by a US firm, involves huge flotillas of vertical pipes in the tropical seas.

The two scientists say they doubt that existing plans for curbing carbon emissions can work quickly enough. "We are taking the very strong line that we are not going to save the planet by the regular approaches like the Kyoto Protocol or renewable energy," Professor Lovelock told BBC News. "What we have to do is to look at it in a systems sense, or a Gaian sense, and see if it's curable by direct action."

Professor Rapley, who has just moved to head up the Science Museum from a similar post at the British Antarctic survey, said the two men developed the ocean pipes concept during country walks in James Lovelock's beloved Devon.

Unbeknown to them, a US company, Atmocean, had already begun trials of a very similar technology. Floating pipes reaching down from the top of the ocean into colder water below move up and down with the swell. As the pipe moves down, cold water flows up and out onto the ocean surface. A simple valve blocks any downward flow when the pipe is moving upwards.

Colder water is more "productive" - it contains more life, and so in principle can absorb more carbon. One of the life-forms that might benefit, Atmocean believes, is the salp, a tiny tube which excretes carbon in its solid faecal pellets, which descend to the ocean floor, perhaps storing the carbon away for millennia.

Atmocean CEO Phil Kithil has calculated that deploying about 134 million pipes could potentially sequester about one-third of the carbon dioxide produced by human activities each year. But he acknowledges that research is in the early stages. "There is much yet to be learned," he told BBC News. "We need not only to move towards the final design and size (of the pipes), but also to characterise the ecological effects. "The problem we would be most concerned about would be acidification. We're bringing up higher levels of CO2 along with the nutrients, so it all has to be analysed as to the net carbon balance and the net carbon flux."

Atmocean deployed experimental tubes earlier this year and gathered engineering data. The pipes brought cold water to the surface from a depth of 200m, but no research has yet been done on whether this approach has any net impact on greenhouse gas levels. The company says a further advantage of cooling surface waters in regions such as the Gulf of Mexico could be a reduction in the number of hurricanes, which need warm water in order to form.

And Professors Lovelock and Rapley suggest that the ocean pipes could also stimulate growth of algae that produce dimethyl sulphide (DMS), a chemical which helps clouds form above the ocean, reflecting sunlight away from the Earth's surface and bringing a further cooling.

In recent years, scientists have developed a wide range of technical "geo-engineering" ideas for curbing global warming. Seeding the ocean with iron filings to stimulate plankton growth, putting sunshades in space, and firing sulphate aerosols into the atmosphere from a giant cannon have all been proposed; the iron filings idea has been extensively tested. But the whole idea of pursuing these "technical fixes" is controversial.

"One has to understand what the consequences of doing these things are," commented Ken Caldeira from the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University in California, who has published a number of analyses of geo-engineering technologies. "There are scientific questions of safety and efficacy; then there are the broader ethical, social and political dimensions, and one of the most disturbing is that if people start getting the idea that technical fixes are available and cheaper than curbing carbon emissions, then people might start relying on them as an alternative to curbing emissions. "So I think it's worth investigating these kinds of ideas, but premature to start deploying them."

Chris Rapley does not believe ideas like the ocean pipes are complete answers to man-made global warming, but may buy time while society develops a more comprehensive response. "It's encouraging to see how much serious effort is going into technical attempts to reduce carbon emissions, and the renewed commitment to finding an international agreement," he said. "But in the meantime, there's evidence that the Earth's response to climate change might be going faster than people have predicted. The dramatic loss of ice in the Arctic, for example, poses a serious concern for the northern hemisphere climate."

Professor Rapley said the letter to Nature, one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals, was intended to get people thinking about the concept of technical fixes rather than just to advocate ocean pipes. "If you think of how the science community has organised itself," he said, "with the World Climate Research Programme, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, International Polar Year and so on - you've got all this intensive interdisciplinary collaboration figuring out what Earth systems are up to and figuring out how they work, but we don't have a similar network working across the entire piece as to what we can actually do to mitigate and adapt."

He said there was a need for some sort of global collaboration to explore potential climate-fixing technologies. "Geo-engineering is one of the types of thing that are worth investigating," opined Ken Caldeira, "and yes, the amount of effort going into thinking of innovative solutions is far too little. "If we can generate 100 ideas, and 97 are bad and we land up with 3 good ones, then the whole thing will have been worthwhile; so I applaud Lovelock and Rapley for thinking along these lines."

He observed that human emissions of greenhouse gases are bringing huge changes to natural ecosystems anyway, so there was nothing morally difficult in principle about deliberately altering the same natural ecosystems to curb climatic change. But changing patterns of ocean life could potentially have major consequences for marine species. Whales that feed on krill, for example, could find their favourite food displaced by salps.

These would all have to be investigated, James Lovelock acknowledged. But, he said, it is time to start. "There may be all sorts of ecological consequences, but the stakes are terribly high."

The idea that hurricanes are blowback for man's polluting ways overlooks the fact that it is only man - through development and construction - who can offset the impacts of freak weather

Chris Mooney has followed up his attack on the Bush administration's scientific record with a more personal examination of hurricanes (1). Storm World was written in response to Katrina, the category 3 hurricane that hit New Orleans in 2005 leading to the breach of the levee and the subsequent flooding of the city with around 1,700 deaths and material costs generally expected to exceed $100billion (2). Amongst the homes that were eventually destroyed was that of Mooney's mother.

Mooney explains that the modern discussion of hurricanes and their relation to global warming mirrors that of the nineteenth century. On the one hand is William (Bill) Gray, a student of Riehl who shot to fame by unveiling the first Atlantic seasonal hurricane forecasting system in 1984, and prides himself on his ability to crunch data and observe patterns, rather like Redfield. On the other hand are scientists like Kerry Emanuel, who rely on theoretical insight and computer modelling to provide an understanding of the weather that can lead to better predictions of future storm activity. Interestingly, both camps appear to agree that warming has occurred and both agree that warming will increase the frequency and intensity of hurricanes. They disagree, profoundly, on what is causing the current warming and how long it will last. Gray believes the warming is somehow related to the thermohaline cycle (5), while almost everyone else believes the warming is due to CO2 emissions. Gray maintains that the warming will soon reverse, as the thermohaline cycle changes, while his opponents believe that what warming has occurred will be at least maintained and will continue to increase as CO2 continues to be released.

Mooney does well to treat Gray's opposition to the consensus on global warming with proper respect, despite Gray's clearly eccentric views and often gross dismissal of his fellow scientists. It would be easy to dismiss Gray out of hand, forgetting that he pioneered the science of hurricane forecasting and has trained a vast number of younger leading hurricane specialists, many of whom now disagree with him. Science depends upon conviction and scepticism much more than consensus; it is grossly unfortunate to dismiss Gray's contribution as heretical. There are plenty of unknowns that Gray rightly draws attention to: the effects of clouds and ocean spray, stabilisation from warming at upper levels, the influence of the thermohaline circulation, and the effect of hurricanes themselves pulling up masses of cooler water. Unfortunately, however, Gray's basic objection to the global warming consensus - that we can't possibly understand the weather, it's too complicated and difficult - is simply unconvincing.

The bottom line question out of all this is: Are hurricanes getting worse because of global warming or not? Mooney is not trying to be catastrophic and self-consciously avoids hyperbole. `Certainly', he says early in his book, `[this work] is no polemic, no work of alarmism. our scientific understanding of the hurricane-climate relationship remains too incomplete to justify such an approach.' Towards the end of his book, the picture that Mooney paints is fairly mundane. In the Atlantic, at least, global warming is likely increasing the intensity, and probably frequency, of hurricanes. More hurricanes and hurricanes of increased intensity is a problem for those who live in the paths of hurricanes, but these problems are hardly new and need not be apocalyptic. The category 4 Galveston Hurricane of 1900 killed between 6,000 and 12,000 people, but modern construction and evacuation options should prevent that scale of death in modern Galveston. In fact, a seawall was built in the aftermath of 1900 and dredged sand was used to elevate the city. A category 3 hurricane that hit Galveston in 1915 killed 275 people, a massive reduction from the 1900 hurricane.

In contrast, a 1970 six-metre storm surge caused by a tropical cyclone equivalent to a category 3 hurricane killed some 300,000 to 500,000 people in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). A cyclone preparedness programme was put in place to warn people of future cyclones but, unlike Galveston, no major sea defences or cyclone-proof homes and bridges were built. In 1991, another intense cyclone with a six-metre storm surge hit Bangladesh and killed around 138,000 people.

Regions that can be hit by hurricanes and cyclones will inevitably be hit by hurricanes and cyclones regardless of the influence of global warming. Whether global warming really is increasing the intensity and incidence of such dramatic weather events, and it seems a fair bet that it is, these weather events fluctuate widely due to many factors that remain to be understood and are a long way from being controlled. Until we can control the weather, defences and evacuation plans can be engineered for the people who choose to live in vulnerable areas and, if necessary, people can permanently relocate.

It is important to recognise that what to do about hurricanes is a social rather than scientific question. It is one thing for scientists to draw attention towards a growing problem such as the potential for more intense and frequent hurricanes due to global warming. It is quite another to tell democratically elected governments how to manage energy policy and city defences in the light of that evidence. Mooney considers the role of science in political decision-making far too uncritically as a choice between `sound science', which emphasises a very high burden of proof before scientific information serves as the basis for significant political action, and the `precautionary principle', which asserts that we cannot wait for all the evidence to come in before we respond.

Both sound science and the precautionary principle fail to provide any resolution to the question of political action. An insistence on a very high burden of proof will mean waiting until something happens and then it is too late. On the other hand, taking action before it is necessary wastes resources. Wisdom lies in knowing when action is necessary, and that is a political decision not a scientific one.

Mooney laments that scientists are too enamoured to the peer-reviewed literature and too reluctant to make general political observations and recommendations. He wants scientists to `stop being only scientists, and realise that they must be communicators - and leaders, and examples - as well'. Following these recommendations will be disastrous for both science and politics.

Good scientists know that their data and observations can be misleading. A single line of investigation is rarely correct absolutely, which is why peer review is so important. It acts as a system of checks and balances to maintain an even keel towards the truth. Scientists respect this process because it generally works and affirms the legitimate nature of science by holding it up to proper scrutiny. Scientists who try to run around this process by appealing directly to the media or politicians undermine the credibility of scientific pursuit. Does Mooney really want scientists delivering their data direct to the media to support their plans for social reorganisation?

Although it might seem entirely sensible for scientists to inform public policy, there is a line between information and policy and between scientists and politicians. Scientists are not democratically elected; they have no popular mandate for deciding what Florida should do about hurricanes or how Bangladesh should organise building policy. However well-intentioned, shifting expertise into a position of authority without electoral support is a form of tyranny. Clearly Mooney does not see it that way, and probably neither do many people. The introduction of science into policy is generally regarded as benign, a well-intentioned and useful process. The aim is to protect life and liberty and not to undermine it. This is disarmingly unlike the tyrannies of the past and so it escapes popular opposition.

The problem, however, is that public and social policy is not something that can be decided by an empirical process that avoids public debate. People can, if they wish, decide to live on the coast in the face of increasing hurricanes. Society can, if it chooses, offset the cost of people being in harm's way. It is not the job of science to decide what is best for humanity; that is the job of the people. If science, even well intentioned and technically correct science, takes that decision away, then we have tyranny.

Reality aces the knowalls again. And the antarctic "ozone hole" has reached record sizes in recent years, DESPITE the abolition of CFCs. The latest reading is not as big as the record 28 million sq km holes that developed during 2000, 2003 and 2006 but is close to it. When will they admit that the whole CFC scare showed only how little they knew?

As the world marks 20 years since the introduction of the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer, Nature has learned of experimental data that threaten to shatter established theories of ozone chemistry. If the data are right, scientists will have to rethink their understanding of how ozone holes are formed and how that relates to climate change.

Long-lived chloride compounds from anthropogenic emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are the main cause of worrying seasonal ozone losses in both hemispheres. In 1985, researchers discovered a hole in the ozone layer above the Antarctic, after atmospheric chloride levels built up. The Montreal Protocol, agreed in 1987 and ratified two years later, stopped the production and consumption of most ozone-destroying chemicals. But many will linger on in the atmosphere for decades to come. How and on what timescales they will break down depend on the molecules' ultraviolet absorption spectrum (the wavelength of light a molecule can absorb), as the energy for the process comes from sunlight. Molecules break down and react at different speeds according to the wavelength available and the temperature, both of which are factored into the protocol.

So Markus Rex, an atmosphere scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, did a double-take when he saw new data for the break-down rate of a crucial molecule, dichlorine peroxide (Cl2O2). The rate of photolysis (light-activated splitting) of this molecule reported by chemists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California1, was extremely low in the wavelengths available in the stratosphere - almost an order of magnitude lower than the currently accepted rate. "This must have far-reaching consequences," Rex says. "If the measurements are correct we can basically no longer say we understand how ozone holes come into being." What effect the results have on projections of the speed or extent of ozone depletion remains unclear.

The rapid photolysis of Cl2O2 is a key reaction in the chemical model of ozone destruction developed 20 years ago2 (see graphic). If the rate is substantially lower than previously thought, then it would not be possible to create enough aggressive chlorine radicals to explain the observed ozone losses at high latitudes, says Rex. The extent of the discrepancy became apparent only when he incorporated the new photolysis rate into a chemical model of ozone depletion. The result was a shock: at least 60% of ozone destruction at the poles seems to be due to an unknown mechanism, Rex told a meeting of stratosphere researchers in Bremen, Germany, last week.

Other groups have yet to confirm the new photolysis rate, but the conundrum is already causing much debate and uncertainty in the ozone research community. "Our understanding of chloride chemistry has really been blown apart," says John Crowley, an ozone researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. "Until recently everything looked like it fitted nicely," agrees Neil Harris, an atmosphere scientist who heads the European Ozone Research Coordinating Unit at the University of Cambridge, UK. "Now suddenly it's like a plank has been pulled out of a bridge." ......

How did we ever survive in the past without California politicians to protect us?

Anyone who breathed the acrid smoke that hung across the Sacramento Valley when forest fires raged this summer must understand why the Sacramento Metropolitan Air Quality Management District has proposed a common-sense rule to restrict wood burning this winter. From the beginning of November to the end of February, those cozy wood fires are the single largest source of lung-piercing fine particulate pollution.

The mixture of soot, smoke, metals, nitrates, sulfates and dust that residential fireplaces emit from burning wood penetrates deep into lungs. Exposure decreases lung function and aggravates asthma and bronchitis. In people with serious heart or lung disease, exposure to wood smoke can cause premature death.

In response to studies that documented serious health impacts, the federal government adopted stringent new standards that require local air districts to reduce the public's exposure to soot. To meet that standard, Sacramento air district officials have proposed Rule 421. It would prohibit residents in Sacramento County from burning wood or pressed logs and pellets in their fireplaces during the 25 to 30 bad air days of the year when particulate pollution is greatest, on those winter days when the air is still and smoke hovers close to the ground. Those who violate the rule would face fines of up to $50 for the first offense.

For local elected officials who sit on the air district board, the most controversial provision of the new rule bans the burning of pressed logs and pellets along with wood. Though less harmful than burning wood, pressed logs and pellets are still 100 times more polluting than natural gas. They contribute to the toxic stew that causes an estimated 90 premature deaths in the Sacramento metropolitan area every year. Rule 421 would cut soot pollution by one third in Sacramento County this coming winter, protect public health and save lives.

The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and a very detailed critique here for more on the Lockwood paper

Friday, September 28, 2007

GOODBYE KYOTO: CANADA TO JOIN ASIA-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP

Prime Minister Stephen Harper used a United Nations conference aimed at saving the Kyoto Protocol as a backdrop yesterday to announce that Canada would join a rival climate change pact. Hours after urging all countries to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 50 per cent in any successor to Kyoto, Mr. Harper told reporters Canada would become the seventh member of the Asia-Pacific Partnership, a group nicknamed the anti-Kyoto partnership by some environmentalists. Seeking to portray Canada as a bridge-builder on the climate change file, Mr. Harper said he wants to be involved in the partnership so he can coax its members into joining a new deal under the United Nations when Kyoto expires in 2012.

The Asia-Pacific Partnership, created last year by Australia, China, India, Japan, Korea and the United States, has been criticized for lacking the mandatory targets contained in Kyoto. Together, the six countries account for nearly half the world's greenhouse-gas emissions. Mr. Harper has hinted previously that Canada would like to join the partnership. His announcement yesterday that this would happen at a meeting in New Delhi next month followed a speech in which he called for a "flexible, balanced" new UN plan to halve greenhouse-gas emissions from their 2006 levels by 2050. His government's plan calls for Canada to cut emissions by 60 to 70 per cent by 2050.

"It's critical that ... all major emitters have binding targets, and one of the reasons it's important for Canada to participate in the Asia-Pacific Partnership is these are the major emitters on the planet," Mr. Harper told reporters. "Those are the discussions we want to be involved in because these are the people that have to get involved in an effective global protocol, or we won't have such a protocol." Mr. Harper, who has been criticized for focusing on targets that are several decades away, told reporters that medium-term targets are also required.

The battle to beat climate change has come down to one weapon -- the price of carbon. And analysts say it is not working. Much lip service has been paid to cutting climate warming carbon emissions through measures such as improved energy efficiency, technological innovation, reduced demand, higher standards and carbon output restrictions. But in most cases the vital incentive is supposed to be provided by achieving a high price for carbon, from which all else would follow. Neither has happened and time is running out.

"The policy instrument of choice pretty well everywhere is a price for carbon, and it is not going to work," said Tom Burke of environment lobby group E3G. "To stop climate change moving from a bad problem getting worse to a worse problem becoming catastrophic, you have to make the global energy system carbon neutral by 2050 -- and that will not happen just using carbon pricing." Burke said what was urgently needed were strict technical standards and investment incentives to achieve the transition. "You have got to drive the carbon out of the energy system and then keep it out forever," he said. "In the first part of that you are making serious step changes. They are not going to be accomplished by marginal changes in price."

The European Union's carbon emissions trading scheme got off to a shaky start due to over-allocation of permits, but has now established a price of about 20 euros a tonne of carbon dioxide. There is also the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol on cutting global carbon emissions, under which developing nations effectively get paid for emissions foregone.

VERY POOR WEAPON

Together, these two have generated a global carbon trade worth billions of dollars and handed vast profits to some key players, but had little measurable effect on carbon emissions. "Governments are relying way too much on the price of carbon to deliver everything," said Jim Watson of Sussex University's Energy Group. "It is a prerequisite but not a panacea. It has to go hand in hand with regulations and technological developments, and they are sadly lacking," he said. "If you rely too much on the carbon price you give people the option of buying their way out of it. It is a very poor weapon in what is supposed to be a war to save humanity. "The oil price shocks of the 1970s didn't wean us off oil, so why should we believe that a high carbon price will wean us off carbon," he added.

The United States appears finally to have bought into the climate change argument having spent years rejecting the idea of man-made global warming, and is hosting a meeting of major emitting nations later this week. The United Nations is also holding a climate summit on Monday, ahead of a crucial meeting in December on the Indonesian island of Bali of UN environment ministers that is supposed to kick start talks on a new global climate treaty. But there is no consensus on what needs to be done or how to achieve it. While some countries want targets and timetables for emissions cuts, to others like the United States the idea is abhorrent.

"The price of carbon has had virtually no effect on the market so far and virtually no effect on climate change," said Oxford University economics professor Dieter Helm. "People like me who think the price of carbon is important don't think it is the only thing that matters. There must be more focus on energy efficiency, more research and development and more renewable energy. "The truth is that Europe has performed less well on carbon dioxide since the late 1990s than the United States -- and Europe is inside Kyoto and has an emissions trading scheme," he said.

Britain pointedly called on the United States yesterday to join other rich nations making binding cuts in greenhouse gas emissions as dozens of world leaders held a summit on the danger of catastrophic climate change. Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, told the meeting at United Nations headquarters that "the greatest challenge we have ever faced as human beings" required action from every developed nation. "That means all of us, including the largest economy in the world, the United States, taking on binding reduction targets," he said. "It is inconceivable that dangerous climate change can be avoided without this happening."

Mr Benn's decision to single out the US during a visit to New York will be regarded in Washington as particularly provocative. President Bush skipped most of the UN meeting yesterday and was planning to attend only a working dinner last night. He has called his own two-day meeting of 15 major economies in Washington later in the week. Although he has abandoned his previous scepticism about man-made climate change and promises to negotiate a "long-term global goal" for cutting emissions, Mr Bush still envisages countries entering framework agreements voluntarily.

"It's our philosophy that each nation has the sovereign capacity to decide for itself what its own portfolio of policies should be," said James Connaughton, the President's chief environmental adviser. The White House remains hostile to international measures such as a cap-and-trade system on emissions, which might increase electricity bills for ordinary Americans, with Mr Connaughton questioning whether a "woman on fixed income in Ohio should pay for carbon dioxide reductions in the oil sector".

European diplomatic sources are complaining privately that Mr Bush's agenda is too limited and threatens to undermine their attempt for a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which was never ratified by the US. Some say that they are already looking "beyond Bush" towards the 2008 presidential elections. Elizabeth Bast, spokeswoman for Friends of the Earth, said: "The US must join the rest of the world in tackling climate change within the United Nations framework, instead of promoting purely voluntary measures that will not achieve necessary emissions reductions."

The UN has tried to smooth over the potential conflict with Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, accepting an invitation to attend the Washington meeting. Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, represented the Bush Administration in the main session of the UN summit. But Arnold Schwarzenegger, the California Governor, upstaged her with his own appearance. "It is time we came together in a new international agreement that can be embraced by rich and poor nations alike," he said. "California is moving the United States beyond debate and doubt to action."

Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary-General, claimed there was now "universal recognition" that the UN provided the right forum for negotiating global action. "The message is simple: we know enough to act; if we do not act now, the impact of climate change will be devastating."

Mr Benn said that a scheduled UN conference on climate change in Bali in December should start negotiations leading to an agreement by the end of 2009 on greenhouse gas emissions after 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol expires. "The ultimate objective of the UN convention on climate change requires at least a halving of global emissions by the middle of this century," he said. At a breakfast appearance before the summit, the Environment Secretary said that he welcomed the "evolving" thinking on global warming by the United States. But he stopped short of calling for binding emissions targets for China's growing economy. "China in the end will have to decide what they are going to contribute," he said.

Those calling on China and India to `kick the coal habit', and opt for less sooty forms of energy, overlook the vast benefits of coal-use for those nations

In Sydney all last week, economic leaders and ministers from 21 nations held the annual meeting of Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC). Rich members of the organisation (Canada, the US, Japan, Australia) rubbed shoulders with poorer ones (China, Indonesia, Vietnam, South Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, Mexico and Peru). Among the issues on the table? Climate change.

Fair enough. What is not so fair, however, is for Western commentators to use the APEC summit to hector China, South East Asia, Korea and also India, a non-member of APEC, about what economists call `choice of technique' in energy supply. These nations, Western environmentalist opinion now insists, should eschew the use of coal and instead embrace cleaner forms of energy.

Welcome to the haughty presumptions and condescending commands of Green Imperialism. The East, we are told, should not follow Cardiff, King Coal and the dirty Victorian way. It should not develop by following the path of soot along which, in decades gone by, we in the West so foolishly mired ourselves. Rather, the East should face up to its twenty-first century planetary responsibilities, and accept that its current enthusiasm for coal (but also its enthusiasm for cleaner nuclear energy) is dangerously misplaced.

Paul Brannen, head of campaigns at Christian Aid, expressed the new dogma in a letter to the UK Guardian: `Carbon has fuelled the rich world's wealth and development. But the devastating impact of climate change means that poor countries cannot now develop in the same way.' (1) Coal, it is felt, is `not an option' for the developing world. Yet in fact, coal will be an important source of energy for the whole world for many decades to come.

In 2005, there were just over 700 billion tonnes of reserves of hard coal and lignite in the Earth. North America had about 200 billion, Russia and its environs 150 billon, India and China 75 billon each, and South Africa 40 billion. The contribution of coal to power generation in different countries reflects its disposition: in 2003, it accounted for half the power generated in the US, two-thirds of that in India, 79 per cent of China's power, and 93 per cent of South Africa's (2). Altogether, coal is far from being a legacy of the nineteenth century. Though it was vital to the industrialisation of Britain then, it remains a sine qua non for three of the key economies of the twenty-first century - America, India and China.

The installed base of coal-fired power plants cannot be wished away as an outdated relic. Without coal, there would be no future for energy and indeed civilisation in large parts of the world. Moreover, though mining coal remains dangerous - especially in China - coal is cheap compared with other sources of fuel.

Cheapness is important to developing nations: they are as yet in little position to substitute other, more expensive energy sources for coal. Even China, with all the US Treasury bonds it owns, cannot afford to invest, either at home or abroad, in alternative fuels on the scale that would allow it to leave coal behind. What's more, coal is a key national resource for China and India. It is vital to something that environmentalists usually talk up: energy security.

Environmentalist thinkers and activists always feared international dependence in energy - particularly dependence on oil in the Middle East. From the green point of view, energy should always be local. However, the local nature of coal for countries like India and China is not seen as a benefit. Yet when accused of double standards, environmentalists point to the heavy carbon emissions that use of coal leads to. Those emissions are an incontestable fact. But what certainly can be contested is greens' dismissal of a technology that could make a difference to the way we use coal: carbon capture and storage (CCS). CCS is an approach which attempts to mitigate global warming by capturing the CO2 that is emitted from power plants and subsequently storing it instead of allowing it to be released into the atmosphere.

For all their mantra-like invocations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, greens rarely mention the fact that even the IPCC favours CCS: it names CCS as one of its `key technologies' for mitigating CO2 emissions (3). It's true that CCS is in its infancy, and it's also true that so far, capitalism is, as usual, not rushing to make the investments that will be required to test and then apply an innovation like CCS. But solar and wind power are also in need of major research and technological advance if ever they are to be a useful and efficient part of the world's energy portfolio: scientists in Japan and China, which are particularly expert in photovoltaic panels, will agree that really competitive devices are 20 or 30 years away. So why, if greens believe the price and viability of renewable energy will come right in time, do so many of them hold a means of dealing with emissions, such as CCS, to be a non-starter?

The answer is that, behind their hostility to coal and CCS, is something much bigger than the important issues of carbon emissions and the need to make the right, dispassionate choice of technique in energy supply. Environmentalists are selective in their optimism because they want to repudiate the twentieth century, not just the coal that, in large part, made that century happen. A little like Lady Macbeth, they guiltily want the dark spots of Western affluence removed. They have premonitions of doom, and are disillusioned with economic growth at home. As a result, they stigmatise burgeoning development in Asia, and especially the coal that fuels it, as a catastrophe.

Today's climate change activists pose as `defenders of science'. Yet not so long ago, they irrationally rejected the scientific truth about GM crops

Hold the front page: `There is no change in the government's policy towards GM crops', says Hilary Benn of Britain's Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Benn's statement was a reaction to yesterday's scaremongering frontpage story in the UK Guardian. The Guardian headline said `The return of GM', and the report claimed that `ministers back moves to grow crops in UK'

It is hard to remember now, but in 2000 environmental campaigners were protesting all over the country, organising meetings and debates and breaking into premises, all to draw the public's attention to the dangers represented by. genetically modified organisms - crops, mainly. Lord Melchett, himself a former Labour cabinet minister turned Greenpeace activist, tore up GM crops. (My grandfather slaved away for his father at Imperial Chemicals Industries, dying young, as many did, because of the way the chemical fumes tended to accelerate your heart rate, leading to the `Tuesday death'. GM crops would help alleviate the need to use these kinds of chemicals.)

The GM debate was remarkable. In quite a short time, environmental campaigners brought to the surface intense public anxieties about the industrialisation of the food chain. Just before the debate about the introduction of GM foods, there had been another public health scare when one government scientist, Dr Robert Lacey, warned that by 1997 one third of Britain could be infected with the debilitating brain illness Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (CJD), from eating beef contaminated with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE)-inducing prions. As it turned out, you were about as likely to die of CJD as you were to be struck by lightning, and there is still no proven link with it and BSE - but public distrust of authority was at an all-time high.

There was no real argument against GM food. But people felt very disconnected from the authorities, having little faith in the public pronouncements that there was no risk. That alone was enough to make most people alarmed. Opportunistically, environmental campaigners realised that they could gain influence by stoking public fears. Activists like journalist Andy Rowell, language-school head Jonathan Matthews of the Norfolk Genetic Interest Network, the Open University academic Mae-Wan Ho, and the Guardian's George Monbiot stirred up a fantastic picture of rogue genes causing all kinds of extraordinary mutations as they passed through the food chain, or as they were carried on the wind from test-beds into `healthy' British meadows.

Of course, there was no scientific evidence whatsoever. The absence of even one example of a negative health impact from the introduction of GM crops in the US put some pressure on the greens. They latched on to examples that really did not demonstrate any danger. Some oil was contaminated, leading to deaths - but it turned out it was nothing to do with GM. And then the Rowett Research Institute's Dr Arpad Pusztai did some experiments on GM lectins in potatoes that seemed to show negative consequences in rats. The press and the environmentalists latched on to the case - except that it only showed that the introduction of poisonous lectins into potatoes was bad for rats. When Pusztai was sacked for overstating the implications of his tests, GM campaigners adopted his case as a cause c,lSbre, only slowly coming to the conclusion that they had indeed overstated the dangers highlighted in Dr Pusztai's tests.

Meanwhile, another hero of the anti-GM lobby, Mae-Wan Ho, who had been involved in biotechnology in the Seventies, was largely preoccupied with the philosophical meaning of genetics rather than hands-on bio-science, and was interested in resurrecting the ideas of the disgraced Soviet biologist Lysenko, and also Bergson's vitalist cult.

GM activists came under pressure from scientists. In a public debate between George Monbiot and biologist Steve Jones, Jones denounced Monbiot as a charlatan (they have since made up). Andy Rowell attacked the scientists for being the mouthpieces of big business. The peer review of Arpad Pusztai's work was denounced as a cover for a hidden agenda to force GM food on an unsuspecting public. Scientific verification was not to be trusted, said the activists, who invoked a higher bar, the `precautionary principle', which puts the onus of proof on those introducing technology that it could do no harm in the future.

Provoking the public's deepest uncertainties about the food chain proved a great success. Supermarkets withdrew GM food from their shelves and made it effectively unmarketable. In 2004, the New Labour government conceded that even the scientific experiments - the rapeseed fields that Melchett had torn down - should be stopped.

The activists, though, were not entirely happy that they had painted themselves into a corner of outright hostility to scientific method. They knew that if their irrational rejection of science and the modern world was made too explicit, people would find it difficult to go along with. On the other hand, the scientists were pretty bruised, too. They were desperate to win back some of the authority they had lost by being portrayed as tools of big business and proto-Frankensteins out to poison the public. Their subsequent pursuit of `public understanding' turned out to mean lots of committees, often full of green activists, seeking to influence the scientists' agenda.

On the issue of climate change, scientists and environmentalists found more to agree on. As the international diplomatic manoeuvres engendered a new science of climate change, there was more influence for those scientists who lent their research to heavy-duty warnings of global catastrophe. The environmentalists were thrilled to find that the one community that had been most resistant to their ideas were now providing the ammunition.

Once environmentalists had routinely attacked science, drawing on the caricatures of the scientific method found in the Frankfurt school of sociology. Now they were defenders of science against the supposedly `irrational' climate change deniers. The radical academic Bruno Latour, who had made a career arguing that science was nothing more than an ideological construct that reflected the interests of the powers-that-be, suddenly changed his mind over the issue of climate change. Protesters against the new runway at Heathrow summed up the activists' changed attitude to science. They marched with a banner that read: `We are armed only with peer-reviewed science.'

The new, more positive attitude to science on the part of the environmentalists, though, is the reason why the previous issue of GM is still unresolved. The pressure for a return to GM testing in Britain comes from the National Farmers Union, which is lobbying to be allowed to introduce the latest biotechnology. Whether a minister did or did not talk to the Guardian over the weekend about reintroducing GM, the government's explicit position is that there will be no return to GM testing.

Still the activists are alarmed. They have an intuitive understanding that they got away with a lot when they committed the UK to outright opposition to GM testing. The decision was an outrage against scientific experimentation. The activists' arguments back then were a lot more hostile to science than they are today. The Guardian suggests that the pro-GM lobbyists, too, think that the debate has moved on, and that GM crops can be defended on grounds that they might be a solution to the problems raised by global warming. But whatever the reason, Britain should be engaged in GM testing - not because it can help with the problems of global warming, but because it is the right thing to do.

The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and a very detailed critique here for more on the Lockwood paper

Thursday, September 27, 2007

The Ultimate Global Warming Challenge announced today that it raised to $125,000 the cash award to the first person to prove in a scientific manner that human emissions of greenhouse gases will cause catastrophic global climate change. (www.UltimateGlobalWarmingChallenge.com)

"Surprisingly no one has entered the contest yet," said Steven Milloy, founder and publisher of JunkScience.com and the sponsor of the Ultimate Global Warming Challenge. "I'm surprised since Al Gore, the United Nations and the mainstream media all seem to think that the notion of man made catastrophic global warming is a no-brainer," Milloy added.

The Ultimate Global Warming Challenge was launched on Aug. 7, 2007 with the popular and highly rated YouTube video entitled, "Can You Save Al Gore?" (http://youtube.com/watch?v=LBCRStksqL0).

"It appears that $100,000 is not enough to spur Al Gore and other climate alarmists to submit their proofs that humans are causing global warming," explained Milloy. "If it's a matter of money, Al Gore and the alarmists should just come out and tell us what sum it will cost the rest of us to see what proof they have."

Greeniness not aesthetic -- even in Oregon

A Bend woman is facing possible legal action for hanging her laundry out to dry. Susan Taylor, who lives in the upscale Awbrey Butte neighborhood, says she's trying to do the right thing for the planet by stringing up her family's clothes. But in doing so she's violating rules meant to keep up appearances in her subdivision, which means she might become a martyr in the so-called right-to-dry movement.

The trouble began last spring after Taylor, 55, decided to do her part to address global warming by stringing up her family's clothes between the pines behind their 2,400-square-foot house. "This is the right thing to do with what's going on with our climate," said the part-time nurse, standing beside her Toyota hybrid sedan.

But neighbors soon complained. In June, Taylor got a letter from the neighborhood's developer, Bend Brooks Resources Corp., saying she was violating Awbrey Butte's covenants, conditions and restrictions. The development's rules require that clotheslines, as well as garbage cans and lawn cuttings, be "screened

The Ogallala Aquifer, which contributes to water supplies in eight states including South Dakota, would be further strained if current trends in ethanol production persist, according to a report released Thursday by an environmental advocacy group. "State agencies that are proposing ethanol plants need to be concerned about water withdrawal," said Timothy D. Male, senior scientist for Environmental Defense. "The direction we're taking is that not all biofuels are created equal, and we need to come up with standards through which we can evaluate all the fuels." State leaders and trade groups, however, defended ethanol as an important component of the rural economy and criticized some of the report's findings.

"I think they're hitting the panic button a little prematurely," said Matt Hartwig, spokesman for the Renewable Fuels Association, a trade group that promotes ethanol. "Our industry is very aware of natural resources, and we're very cautious in how we use those resources." Hartwig said ethanol plants go through a lengthy approval process and have to meet standards that include ensuring adequate water supplies. "We're also working on technologies that will continue to improve ethanol production efficiencies, which include reducing water use," he said.

Ethanol's popularity as an alternative fuel has reached an all-time high. With about 119 plants nationwide and 86 more on the way, the country's ethanol output was about 6 billion gallons last year, according to the RFA. But according to the Environmental Defense report, President Bush's goal of 35 billion gallons of ethanol by 2015 is "almost certain to result in a major increase in corn production." That increase will strain the underground aquifer, as well as grasslands that would be turned into cropland to grow the corn used in most ethanol plants.

The Environmental Defense report said new corn ethanol plants under construction in areas of highest depletion in the aquifer will increase the region's ethanol production by 900 percent. "This dramatic expansion of ethanol production has substantial implications for already strained water and grassland resources in the Ogallala Aquifer region," according to the report.

But Geoff Cooper, spokesman for the National Corn Growers Association in St. Louis, said of the additional 14 million acres of corn planted last year, none came from native grassland or pasture land "or anything like that." "To suggest corn is going to be planted on native grassland is a stretch, and we just don't see it playing out that way," Cooper said.

Water demands from the ethanol plants in areas where the aquifer is depleted "may reach 2.6 billion gallons per year for corn-to-fuel processing alone, and between 59 and 120 billion gallons per year for increased water demand if there are local increases in irrigated corn production," according to the report. The eight Ogallala states are Kansas, Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, New Mexico, South Dakota, Oklahoma and Texas.

Ethanol production in Kansas, which has nine ethanol plants, with a capacity of more than 270.5 million gallons, was expected to quadruple by 2010. The report said if four new ethanol plants in Kansas lead to any increase in local irrigated corn production, the plants would have an "even larger impact on water pumping demands in one of the most over exploited sections of the Ogallala Aquifer, where a large region of the water table declined by over 40 feet between 1980 and 1996." But Kansas Agriculture Secretary Adrian Polansky said ethanol plants in Kansas do not adversely affect the aquifer.

"Ethanol plants being put in place in western Kansas in the Ogallala Aquifer area have no impact on the water use in that area," Polansky said. "The Ogallala Aquifer area is basically closed to new appropriation." Polansky also said the increased demand for corn did not have a major effect on corn production in Kansas last year. Kansas farmers planted about 3.65 million acres of corn last year, and this year they planted 3.7 million acres. "That's hardly a significant change," he said. "I think it's very oversimplistic to try to make conclusions about what farmers' decisions will be because of ethanol."

"The increase in global temperatures has been in the last years, decades and centuries very small in historical comparisons and practically negligible in its actual impact upon human beings and their activities," Czech President Vaclav Klaus said at the world politicians' meeting on global warming today. The conference in New York has been organised by U.N. General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon.

Klaus said "the hypothetical threat connected with future global warming depends exclusively upon very speculative forecasts, not upon undeniable past experience and upon its trends and tendencies. These forecasts are based on relatively short-time series of relevant variables and on forecasting models that have not been proved very reliable when attempting to explain past developments."

No scientific consensus exists, "contrary to many self-assured and self-serving proclamations" about the causes of the ongoing climate changes, Klaus said. The arguments of both parties in dispute - i.e. those believing in "man's dominant role in recent climate changes" and those who support the hypothesis about "its mostly natural origin" - are so strong that they must be listened to carefully, Klaus continued. "To prematurely proclaim the victory of one group over another would be a tragic mistake and I am afraid we are making it," Klaus continued.

"Different levels of development, income and wealth in different places of the world make worldwide, overall and universal solutions costly, unfair and to a great extent discriminatory. The already-developed countries do not have the right to impose any additional burden on the less developed countries. Dictating ambitious and for them entirely inappropriate environmental standards is wrong and should be excluded from the menu of recommended policy measures."

He proposed that the U.N. organise two parallel inter-government discussion panels and issue two competing reports on climate changes. "To get rid of a one-sided monopoly is a condition sine qua non for an efficient and rational debate. Providing the same or comparable financial backing to both groups of scientists is a necessary starting point," Klaus said.

Commenting on the issue for public Czech Radio (CRo) later today, Klaus said "Let's not create a false illusion that we share a single expected opinion. This is simply just the huge cheat and trick ... the gentlemen such as [Al] Gore and [Martin] Bursik have created." He alluded to former U.S. vice-president and to the Czech Green Party (SZ) chairman, respectively....

In his New York speech Klaus said that "as a result of the scientific dispute there are those who call for an imminent action and those who warn against it. Rational behaviour should depend on the size of the probability of the risk and on the magnitude of the costs of its avoidance." "As as a responsible politician, as an economist, as an author of a book on the economic of climate changes, with all available data and arguments in mind, I have to conclude that the risk is too small, the costs of eliminating it too big and the application of a fundamentally-interpreted precautionary principle a wrong strategy," Klaus stated.

What is it about climate change that attracts charlatans? While the focus has been on the Howard Government these past few days, what about the political snake-oil salesmen who would have you believe that we can reduce carbon emissions and fix global warming in the near term? That we can pull it off without noticeable economic or political pain and without worrying about what developing countries do. All bunkum. But you wouldn’t know that just by listening to the siren songs of the federal ALP or the Greens. They tell us breezily we can have it all, no worries. Where is the probing, sceptical media when these sorts of porkies are told?

Labor’s climate change policy represents the sort of brazen deception that Hugh Mackay would have no hesitation labelling “shameless mendacity” had it been offered up by the Liberal Party. But because Mackay and his progressive friends are barracking for Kevin 07, they have gone missing in action on the issue of what an ALP government can, and will, deliver on climate change.

A couple of striking recent developments in NSW tell us what a real live ALP government would be forced to do if it got its hands on the levers of power. It doesn’t bear any resemblance to the cuddly, idealistic promises of the Kevin 07 campaign. Federal Labor is hoping nobody will notice the yawning gap between what can be delivered on climate change without passing through the public’s pain barrier and what Peter Garrett and co are holding out to us.

Which is why we ought to take a close look at NSW, where this problem is writ large. The NSW Iemma Government is acutely aware of the chasm between reality and spin because it actually holds the reins of government.

Exhibit one from the NSW Government reality file is Moolarben. A few weeks ago, the NSW Government approved the development of a massive new coal mine at Moolarben near Mudgee despite loud protests from environmental and residents groups. Moolarben is huge. The Sydney Morning Herald reported it would produce 504 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, equivalent to 168 million more cars on the roads and almost as much climate change pollution as Australia generates in a year. If you’re a climate change purist, this is surely a disaster. But the iron law of political reality meant it had to be approved. A cleaner environment tomorrow is no substitute, electorally speaking, for jobs and prosperity today.

As Tasmanian forestry unions taught us at the previous election, the first duty of any Labor government is to preserve and enhance the jobs of union members. Utopian promises of a clean, green environment free of coal mines and timber workers must always surrender to reality.

This is one reason that those telling you it is possible to have meaningful and binding international targets on carbon emission in the near term are practising a fraud. If the NSW Government cannot say no to the jobs generated by the coal industry, can we realistically expect developing countries such as China to do so?

And any scheme that imposes real and effective targets on developed countries but not on developing countries is no more than a scheme to export jobs from Australia to China. Now, Bob Brown and Garrett may have no objection to that. But the hard heads in the ALP know better.

Exhibit two from the NSW school of practical political reality. The NSW Labor Government realises that NSW needs at least one large new power station to “keep the lights on”, to quote Premier Morris Iemma. But as Tony Owen told the Government in his report, it cannot afford to have one without privatising the NSW electricity retailing sector at a minimum, and probably also the generation sector as well.

Herein lies not one but two delicious ironies. Privatising the power industry in order to fund a new power station, inevitably coal-fired, shatters two sacred tenets of the left-wing faith. Thou shalt not privatise. Thou shalt not build more coal-fired power stations.

The need to preserve the jobs of electricity workers, no matter what the cost, will likely mean privatisation will fail because the unions will oppose it, just as they did when former premier Bob Carr and his treasurer Michael Egan went down that path in 1997. Already the unions who pull the NSW Government’s strings have vetoed privatisation.

Interestingly, according to reports in The Daily Telegraph, they have done an unholy deal with the NSW Government to keep any dispute between them quiet until after the federal election. Similarly, if NSW needs a coal-fired power station to keep the lights on, they will get one. At public expense. No matter what climate change commandments are broken in the process. Union jobs will always outrank the cost to the public and certainly trump a clean atmosphere.

The hard men from Labor’s NSW Right faction learned those lessons of practical politics along with their two-times tables. And the key lesson for voters is that federal ALP is run by such practical men today. Men such as Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan. They know, though they are not saying, that Garrett, Anthony Albanese and ALP promises of a clean, green tomorrow are all just flim-flam election material. They know that, pre-election, the vast gap between what they promise on climate change and what an ALP government can actually deliver needs to be filled with a combination of smoke, mirrors and lies.

Should Labor win the federal election, these childish stunts will stop and the real business of governing will begin. Perhaps we should be grateful: adhering to idealistic targets, butchering the coal industry and banning electric hot-water systems will simply impoverish Australians and send jobs offshore without making a jot of difference to world carbon levels or global warming.

If we think the Chinese are going to stop opening new coal-fired power stations because we veto new Moolarbens and won’t sell them coal, we have a shaky grip on reality. So the realpolitik of the ALP hard heads is infinitely to be preferred to the Pollyanna-type views of the dreamers who write the campaign ads and the jingles about clean green futures.

But it would be nice to think that when this inevitable deceit is practised upon us, it would be fearlessly exposed. To think that the left-wing faithful, the artists, poets, actors and playwrights will complain about a lack of public decency in public life, led by Mackay, excoriating the mendacious in public office. To think the intelligentsia will moan about being lied to and write books titled, Not Happy, Kev.

The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and a very detailed critique here for more on the Lockwood paper

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Nearly two dozen prominent scientists from around the world have denounced a recent Associated Press article promoting sea level fears in the year 2100 and beyond based on unproven computer models predictions. The AP article also has been accused of mischaracterizing the views of a leading skeptic of man-made global warming fears. The scientists are dismissing the AP article, entitled “Rising Seas Likely to Flood U.S. History”(LINK) as a “scare tactic,” “sheer speculation,” and “hype of the worst order.” (H/T: Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters.org - LINK)

Dr. Richard S. Courtney, a climate and atmospheric science consultant and a UN IPCC expert reviewer ridiculed the AP article. “Rarely have I read such a collection of unsubstantiated and scare-mongering twaddle. Not only do real studies show no increase to rate of sea level change, the[AP] article gives reasons for concern that are nonsense,” Courtney told Inhofe EPW Press Blog on September 23.

UN IPCC reviewer and climate researcher Dr Vincent Gray, of New Zealand slammed the article as well: “This [AP article] is a typical scare story based on no evidence or facts, but only on the ‘opinions’ and ‘beliefs’ of ‘experts’, all of whom have a financial interest in the promotion of their computer models,” Gray wrote to the Inhofe EPW Press Blog.

Swedish Professor Wibjorn Karlen of the Department of Social and Economic Geography at Stockholm University: “Another of these hysterical views of our climate,” Karlen wrote to Inhofe EPW Press Blog regarding the AP article. "Newspapers should think about the damage they are doing to many persons, particularly young kids, by spreading the exaggerated views of a human impact on climate,” Karlen explained. The September 22, 2007 Associated Press article promoting future computer generated climate fears, appears just days before a high profile UN climate summit in New York Citythis week. The AP’s Seth Borenstein has a history of promoting unverifiable climate fears of the future (See: “AP Incorrectly claims scientists praise Gore’s movie” from June 2006 – LINK )

This AP report comes at a time when the peer-reviewed science is continuing to debunk the foundation of man-made climate change fears. (See "New Peer-Reviewed Scientific Studies Chill Global Warming Fears" (LINK)

Alabama State Climatologist Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, stated that the AP mischaracterized his views on sea level in the article promoting climate fears a hundred years from now. “[My] discussion [with the AP reporter Seth Borenstein] was primarily about the storm surges which come from hurricanes - that's the real vulnerability. The sea level is rising around 1 inch per decade, but sea level is like any other climate parameter - its either rising or falling all the time. To me, 16 inches per century is not a significant problem to deal with. But since storm surges of 15 to 30 feet occur in 6 hours, any preventive strategy, like an extra 3 feet of elevation, would be helpful,” Christy wrote to the Inhofe EPW Press blog. “Thinking that legislation can change sea level is hubris. I did a calculation on what 1000 new nuclear power plants operating by 2020 would do for the IPCC best guess in the year 2100. The answer is 1.4 cm – about half an inch (if you accept the IPCC projection A1B for the base case.) Also, there doesn't seem to be any acceleration of the slow trend,” Christy explained.

Borenstein's AP article stated: “Ultimately, rising seas will likely swamp the first American settlement in Jamestown, Va., as well as the Florida launch pad that sent the first American into orbit, many climate scientists are predicting. In about a century, some of the places that make America what it is may be slowly erased.”

Borenstein, who only quotes six scientists in the article, of which only one can be labeled a climate skeptic, uses the generic phrase “several leading scientists say." [EPW Blog Note: This blog report alone quotes nearly twodozen climate experts countering the AP’s “report” on sea level]

Borenstein’s article also claims alarming sea levels “will happen regardless of any future actions to curb greenhouse gases, several leading scientists say. And it will reshape the nation.” “Storm surges worsened by sea level rise will flood the waterfront getaways of rich politicians—the Bushes' Kennebunkport and John Edwards' place on the Outer Banks. And gone will be many of the beaches in Texas and Florida favored by budget-conscious students on Spring Break,” Borenstein’s AP article continued.

But prominent scientists are speaking out and denouncing the article a mere hours after its publication. Here is a sampling of scientists’ reaction to the AP story:

State of Florida Climatologist Dr. Jim O'Brien of Florida State University countered the AP article. “The best measurements of sea level rise are from satellite instrument called altimeters. Currently they measure 14 inches in 100 years. Everyone agrees that there is no acceleration. Even the UN IPCC quotes this,” O’Brien wrote to EPW on September 23. O’Brien is also the director of the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies. “If you increase the rate of rise by four times, it will take 146 years to rise to five feet. Sea level rise is the ‘scare tactic’ for these guys,” O’Brien added.

Climate researcher Dr Vincent Gray, of New Zealand, an expert reviewer on every single draft of the IPCC reports going back to 1990: "The IPCC never makes predictions, only projections" -- what might happen, or be 'likely' if you believe the assumptions in the model. No computer model has ever been shown to be capable of successful prediction", Gray wrote to the Inhofe EPW Press Blog on September 23. “Actual data on sea levels are unreliable. Long term figures are based on tide-gauge measurements near port cities prone to subsidence and damage of equipment from severe weather. Many recent and more reliable measurements show little recent change. Satellite measurements have shown a recent rise which may be temporary,” Gray added.

Dr. Boris Winterhalter, a retired Senior Research Scientist and Coordinator for national international marine geological research at the Geological Survey of Finland: “Even the worst case scenario is half of that quoted by Associated Press. This is a hype of the worst order. This whole scare builds on GCM's which we know mimic Earth processes very simplistically and are thus most unreliable,” Winterhalter told Inhofe EPW Press Blog on September 23. “I, as a marine geologist, am abhorred. I just looked at the USGS (US Geological Survey) site and am astonished that none of the references or fact sheets seem to refer to IPCC Fourth Assessment Report released this spring,” Winterhalter added.

Dr. Richard S. Courtney, a climate and atmospheric science consultant and a UN IPCC expert reviewer: “Global sea level has been rising for the 10,000 years since the last ice age, and no significant change to the rate of sea level rise has been observed recently,” Courtney wrote to Inhofe EPW Press Blog on September 23. "A continuing rise of ~2 mm/year for the next 100 years would raise sea level by ~0.2 m as it did during the twentieth century. And it is hard to seeany justification forAndrew Weaver's claim (as quoted by AP) that ‘We're going to get a meter and there's nothing we can do about it, unless Weaver is talking about the next 500 years,” Courtney wrote. “Simply, there is no reason to suppose that sea level rise will be more of a problem in this century than it was in the last century or each of the previous ten centuries,” he concluded.

Geophysicist Dr. David Demingof University of Oklahoma. “Projections of sea-level rise are based on projections of future warming, fifty or a hundred years hence. And these projections are based on speculative computer models that have numerous uncertainties,” Deming wrote in a September 23, e-mail to Inhofe EPW Press Blog. “These models cannot even be tested; their validity is completely unknown. In short, predictions of future sea-level rise are nothing but sheer speculation,” Deming added.

Swedish Professor Wibjorn Karlen of the Department of Social and Economic Geography at Stockholm University: "I have used the NASA temperature data for a study of several major areas. As far as I can see the IPCC Global Temperature is wrong. Temperature is fluctuating but it is still most places cooler than in the 1930s and 1940s," Karlen wrote to Inhofe EPW Press Blog regarding the AP article. “The latest estimates of sea level rise are 1.31 mm/year. With this water level increase it will take about 800 years before the water level has increased by 1 m if not conditions change before that (very likely). Society will looks very different at that time,” he added.

Emmy Nominated Meteorologist Art Horn says AP loves ‘a scary story’ “Fearless forecasts from people who likely have never made real time, real world predictions. We who have worked in the real world of everyday weather forecasting for decades understand what it's like to be burned, even when you felt the forecast was a lock. I'm of the belief that most if not all of these predictions come from people who don't know much about the nature of prediction,” Horn wrote to Inhofe EPW Press Blog the day after the AP article was published. “Working with computer models that don't even start with a climate remotely similar to the real world can't give you results that are in any way close to useful. But the AP and all news organizations love a scary story. I know, I worked as a TV meteorologist for 25 years. If it will generate a buzz they will run with it,” Horn explained. “Making predictions about how much sea level will rise helps to insure the money train will continue. There will be people in seats of power that will continue to feed money to universities, research facilities and people like [NASA’s] James Hansen.

Greenpeace co-founder ecologist Dr. Patrick Moore noted the AP article was way off base from even the UN IPCC predictions. “The IPCC predicts 18 - 59 cm, i.e. their high end is about half predicted in the AP story, and the AP story warns of a possible three meters,” Moore told Inhofe EPW Press Blog. “The sea was 400 feet (130 meters)lower than today at the peak of the last Ice Age 18,000 years ago. This is an average of 72 cm/100 years. Most of this occurred between 18,000 and 6,000 years ago so there were periods when the sea rose more that 1 meter per 100 years,” Moore concluded.

Former Harvard physicist Dr. Lubos Motl: “There's no good reason to expect more than 3 millimeters per year in average. It's been really 1.5 mm in the last 50 years, and 2 mm per year in 1900-1950. The rate has actuallyslowed down according to some papers,” Motl wrote to Inhofe EPW Press Blog. “Any model that predicts significant acceleration [of sea level] with growing CO2 is falsified or nearly falsified by the observed data. It's crazy to think that this slow gradual rise is anything that would justify any actions besides the houses that have to be either moved or protected on the centennial scale,” he added. “Any calculation that wants to indicate that the effects of sea level rise are a significant portion of the life or the economy is simply a miscalculation,” he concluded.

Chemist and agronomist Paavo Siitam: “Despite some doom and gloom predictions, excluding waves washing onto shores by relatively rarely occurring tsunamis and storm-surges, low-lying areas on the face of our planet have NOT yet been submerged by rising oceans... so probably low-lying areas along shorelines of Canada and the USA will be SAFE into foreseeable and even distant futures,” Siitam wrote to Inhofe EPW Press Blog. “By the way, I'd be happy to buy prized oceanfront properties at bargain prices, anywhere in the world, when unwarranted, panic selling begins. The dire predictions will not come true this century,” he added.

IPCC 2007 Expert Reviewer Dr. Madhav Khandekar, a Ph.D meteorologist: “I cannot help but conclude that this is one more example of scare-mongering by some very reputed scientists inthe atmosphere/ocean science. I am disappointed to find that none of these scientists seem to want to refer to the excellent work of Prof Morner of Stockholm University who was the President of the INQUA commission for Maldive Islands SLR and who has discounted & dismissed theMaldive Islands 'disappearing' in ONE hundred years or even earlier accordingto some scare-mongerers!” Khandekar wrote to Inhofe EPW Press Blog. “Besides Prof Morner's excellent studies, the scientists named in the news story seem to have ignored another well-documented study by Simon Holgate , an oceanographer in UK, whose paper in GRL( Geophysical Research Letters, 2007) has analyzed nine long sea-level records from 1903-2003 and the study finds that the SLR from 1953-2003 was about 1.5 mm/yr while the SLR from 1903-1953 was about 2 mm/yr, so there is NO ESCALATING sea level rise at present,” Khandekar explained. “If the earth's climate enters into a mini ice age by 2035-2040 as several solar scientists are suggesting now, we may NOT even see half the sea level rise as quoted above,” he added.

Atmospheric physicist Dr. Fred Singer: “The key to Borenstein’s story is the first very word: 'Ultimately.' Yes -- with sea level continuing to rise at therate of about seven inches per century (as it has in past centuries), Florida will be flooded in afew 1000 years,” Singer, co-author of “Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years,” wrote. Singer added sea levels will rise “unless a new ice age begins sooner -- lowering sea level -- asocean water turns into continental ice sheets.”

Dr. Art Robinson of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine: “Long term temperature data suggest that the current - entirely natural and not man made - temperature rise of about 0.5 degrees C per century could continue for another 200 years. Therefore, the best data available leads to an extrapolated value of about 1 foot of rise during the next two centuries,” Robinson explained to Inhofe EPW Press Blog. ”There is no scientific basis upon which to guess that the rise will be less or will be more than this value. Such a long extrapolation over two centuries is likely to be significantly in error - but it is the only extrapolation that can be made with current data. There may be no sea level rise at all. No one knows,” he added.

Accuweather chief meteorologist Joe Bastardi, who specializes in long-range forecasts, slammed the AP article for being offering up "a series of anything can happen and probably will statements." “As someone who competes in the private sector and gets fired if my forecasts are not supply enough merit to be right enough for clients to benefit, I would welcome the kind of padding one has in making such outrageous long range forecasts that no one still alive will be able to verify,” Bastardi explained.

Ivy League forecasting expert Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania and his colleague Kesten Green Monash University in Australia: “Dire consequences have been predicted to arise from warming of the Earth in coming decades of the 22nd Century. Enormous sea level rises is one of the more dramatic forecasts. According to the AP’s Borenstein, such sea-level forecasts were experts' judgments on what will happen,” Armstrong and Green wrote to Inhofe EPW Press Blog. “As shown in our analysis experts' forecasts have no validity in situations characterized by high complexity, high uncertainty, and poor feedback. To date we are unaware of any forecasts of sea levels that adhere to proper (scientific) forecasting methodology and our quick search on Google Scholar came up short,” Armstrong and Green explained. “Media outlets should be clear when they are reporting on scientific work and when they are reporting on the opinions held by some scientists. Without scientific support for their forecasting methods, the concerns of scientists should not be used as a basis for public policy,” they concluded.

The Viscount Christopher Monckton of Brenchley in the UK, an advisor to the Science and Pulblic Policy Institute, who has authored numerous climate science analyses (LINK): “Given the absence of credible evidence for extreme sea-level rise over the coming century in the peer-reviewed literature, theIPCC has been compelled to reduce its sea-level estimates. The mean centennial sea-level rise over then 10,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age has been 4 feet per century; in the 20th century sea level rose less than 8 inches; and the IPCC's current central estimate is that in the coming century sea level will rise by just 43 cm (1 ft 5 in),” Monckton wrote to Inhofe EPW Press Blog.

Canadian economist Dr. Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph in Ontario (who was key in debunking the infamous “Hockey Stick”) pointed out that real estate values would be plummeting on the coastlines if the AP article was accurate. “If what they're saying is true, we will see the effect on land values long before we see the effect on sea levels. They are saying that it is certain that all sea-level waterfront property around the US will be worthless in 50-100 years. Since the market is very efficient at discounting future certainties into present values, US beachfront property ought to be losing at least 20 percent of its remaining value every decade from now on,” McKitrick wrote to Inhofe EPW Press Blog. ”It might be worth asking some real estate agents, especially in places like Hollywood and the Hamptons, where there seems to be such a consciousness of global warming, if beachfront owners are beginning to dump their properties at a discount. Because, of course, if some people have inside information that this land is really going to be worthless soon, they'll be the first ones to cash out and move to higher ground,” he concluded.

Ivy League geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack of the University of Pennsylvania, explains that sea level is only rising up 1.8 millimeters per year (0.07 inches) -- less than the thickness of one nickel "Sea level is rising," Giegengack said, butit's been rising ever since warming set in 18,000 years ago, he explained according to a February 2007 article in Philadelphia Magazine. “So if for some reason this warming process that melts ice is cutting loose and accelerating, sea level doesn’t know it. And sea level, we think, is the best indicator of global warming,"he said.(LINK) Giegengack also noted that the historyof the last one billion years on the planet reveals"only about 5% of that time has been characterized by conditions on Earth that were so cold that the poles could support masses of permanent ice." (LINK)

Prominent scientist Professor Nils-Axel Morner, declared "the rapid rise in sea levelspredicted by computer models simply cannot happen." Morner, a leading world authority on sea levels and coastal erosion who headedthe Department of Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics at Stockholm University,notedon August 6, 2007: "When we were coming out of the last ice age, huge ice sheets were melting rapidly and the sea level rose at an average of one meter per century. If the Greenland ice sheet stated to melt at the same rate - which is unlikely - sea level would rise by less than 100 mm - 4 inches per century." Morner, whowas president of the INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution from1999 to 2003, has published a new booklet entitled"The Greatest Lie Ever Told," to refute claims of catastrophic sea level rise. (LINK)

AMAZON FOREST SHOWS UNEXPECTED RESILIENCY DURING DROUGHT

That pesky reality again

Drought-stricken regions of the Amazon forest grew particularly vigorously during the 2005 drought, according to new research. The counterintuitive finding contradicts a prominent global climate model that predicts the Amazon forest would begin to "brown down" after just a month of drought and eventually collapse as the drought progressed. "Instead of 'hunkering down' during a drought as you might expect, the forest responded positively to drought, at least in the short term," said study author Scott R. Saleska of The University of Arizona. "It's a very interesting and surprising response." UA co-author Kamel Didan added, "The forest showed signs of being more productive. That's the big news."

The 2005 drought reached its peak at the start of the Amazon's annual dry season, from July through September. Although the double whammy of the parched conditions might be expected to slow growth of the forest's leafy canopy, for many of the areas hit by drought, the canopy of the undisturbed forest became significantly greener -- indicating increased photosynthetic activity.

Saleska, a UA assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and his colleagues at the UA and at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil used data from two NASA satellites to figure out that undisturbed Amazon forest flourished as rainfall levels plummeted. "No one had looked at the observations that are available from satellites," said Didan, an associate research scientist in the UA's department of soil, water and environmental science. "We took the opportunity of the most recent drought, the 2005 drought, to do so." "A big chunk of the Amazon forest, the southwest region where the drought was severest, reacted positively," said Didan, a NASA-EOS MODIS associate science team member.

Today's climate change activists pose as `defenders of science'. Yet not so long ago, they irrationally rejected the scientific truth about GM crops

Hold the front page: `There is no change in the government's policy towards GM crops', says Hilary Benn of Britain's Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Benn's statement was a reaction to yesterday's scaremongering frontpage story in the UK Guardian. The Guardian headline said `The return of GM', and the report claimed that `ministers back moves to grow crops in UK'

It is hard to remember now, but in 2000 environmental campaigners were protesting all over the country, organising meetings and debates and breaking into premises, all to draw the public's attention to the dangers represented by. genetically modified organisms - crops, mainly. Lord Melchett, himself a former Labour cabinet minister turned Greenpeace activist, tore up GM crops. (My grandfather slaved away for his father at Imperial Chemicals Industries, dying young, as many did, because of the way the chemical fumes tended to accelerate your heart rate, leading to the `Tuesday death'. GM crops would help alleviate the need to use these kinds of chemicals.)

The GM debate was remarkable. In quite a short time, environmental campaigners brought to the surface intense public anxieties about the industrialisation of the food chain. Just before the debate about the introduction of GM foods, there had been another public health scare when one government scientist, Dr Robert Lacey, warned that by 1997 one third of Britain could be infected with the debilitating brain illness Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (CJD), from eating beef contaminated with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE)-inducing prions. As it turned out, you were about as likely to die of CJD as you were to be struck by lightning, and there is still no proven link with it and BSE - but public distrust of authority was at an all-time high.

There was no real argument against GM food. But people felt very disconnected from the authorities, having little faith in the public pronouncements that there was no risk. That alone was enough to make most people alarmed. Opportunistically, environmental campaigners realised that they could gain influence by stoking public fears. Activists like journalist Andy Rowell, language-school head Jonathan Matthews of the Norfolk Genetic Interest Network, the Open University academic Mae-Wan Ho, and the Guardian's George Monbiot stirred up a fantastic picture of rogue genes causing all kinds of extraordinary mutations as they passed through the food chain, or as they were carried on the wind from test-beds into `healthy' British meadows.

Of course, there was no scientific evidence whatsoever. The absence of even one example of a negative health impact from the introduction of GM crops in the US put some pressure on the greens. They latched on to examples that really did not demonstrate any danger. Some oil was contaminated, leading to deaths - but it turned out it was nothing to do with GM. And then the Rowett Research Institute's Dr Arpad Pusztai did some experiments on GM lectins in potatoes that seemed to show negative consequences in rats. The press and the environmentalists latched on to the case - except that it only showed that the introduction of poisonous lectins into potatoes was bad for rats. When Pusztai was sacked for overstating the implications of his tests, GM campaigners adopted his case as a cause c,lSbre, only slowly coming to the conclusion that they had indeed overstated the dangers highlighted in Dr Pusztai's tests.

Meanwhile, another hero of the anti-GM lobby, Mae-Wan Ho, who had been involved in biotechnology in the Seventies, was largely preoccupied with the philosophical meaning of genetics rather than hands-on bio-science, and was interested in resurrecting the ideas of the disgraced Soviet biologist Lysenko, and also Bergson's vitalist cult.

GM activists came under pressure from scientists. In a public debate between George Monbiot and biologist Steve Jones, Jones denounced Monbiot as a charlatan (they have since made up). Andy Rowell attacked the scientists for being the mouthpieces of big business. The peer review of Arpad Pusztai's work was denounced as a cover for a hidden agenda to force GM food on an unsuspecting public. Scientific verification was not to be trusted, said the activists, who invoked a higher bar, the `precautionary principle', which puts the onus of proof on those introducing technology that it could do no harm in the future.

Provoking the public's deepest uncertainties about the food chain proved a great success. Supermarkets withdrew GM food from their shelves and made it effectively unmarketable. In 2004, the New Labour government conceded that even the scientific experiments - the rapeseed fields that Melchett had torn down - should be stopped.

The activists, though, were not entirely happy that they had painted themselves into a corner of outright hostility to scientific method. They knew that if their irrational rejection of science and the modern world was made too explicit, people would find it difficult to go along with. On the other hand, the scientists were pretty bruised, too. They were desperate to win back some of the authority they had lost by being portrayed as tools of big business and proto-Frankensteins out to poison the public. Their subsequent pursuit of `public understanding' turned out to mean lots of committees, often full of green activists, seeking to influence the scientists' agenda.

On the issue of climate change, scientists and environmentalists found more to agree on. As the international diplomatic manoeuvres engendered a new science of climate change, there was more influence for those scientists who lent their research to heavy-duty warnings of global catastrophe. The environmentalists were thrilled to find that the one community that had been most resistant to their ideas were now providing the ammunition.

Once environmentalists had routinely attacked science, drawing on the caricatures of the scientific method found in the Frankfurt school of sociology. Now they were defenders of science against the supposedly `irrational' climate change deniers. The radical academic Bruno Latour, who had made a career arguing that science was nothing more than an ideological construct that reflected the interests of the powers-that-be, suddenly changed his mind over the issue of climate change. Protesters against the new runway at Heathrow summed up the activists' changed attitude to science. They marched with a banner that read: `We are armed only with peer-reviewed science.'

The new, more positive attitude to science on the part of the environmentalists, though, is the reason why the previous issue of GM is still unresolved. The pressure for a return to GM testing in Britain comes from the National Farmers Union, which is lobbying to be allowed to introduce the latest biotechnology. Whether a minister did or did not talk to the Guardian over the weekend about reintroducing GM, the government's explicit position is that there will be no return to GM testing.

Still the activists are alarmed. They have an intuitive understanding that they got away with a lot when they committed the UK to outright opposition to GM testing. The decision was an outrage against scientific experimentation. The activists' arguments back then were a lot more hostile to science than they are today. The Guardian suggests that the pro-GM lobbyists, too, think that the debate has moved on, and that GM crops can be defended on grounds that they might be a solution to the problems raised by global warming. But whatever the reason, Britain should be engaged in GM testing - not because it can help with the problems of global warming, but because it is the right thing to do.

The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and a very detailed critique here for more on the Lockwood paper

Background

This site is in favour of things that ARE good for the environment. That the usual Greenie causes are good for the environment is however disputed. Greenie policies can in fact be actively bad for the environment -- as with biofuels, for instance

This Blog by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.), writing from Brisbane, Australia.

I am the most complete atheist you can imagine. I don't believe in Karl Marx, Jesus Christ or global warming. And I also don't believe in the unhealthiness of salt, sugar and fat. How skeptical can you get? If sugar is bad we are all dead

And when it comes to "climate change", I know where the skeletons are buried

There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be challenged, no sacred truths.

Context for the minute average temperature change recorded in the graph above: At any given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about 100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. A minute rise in average temperature in that context is trivial if it is not meaningless altogether. Scientists are Warmists for the money it brings in, not because of the facts

"Thinking" molecules?? Terrestrial temperatures have gone up by less than one degree over the last 150 years and CO2 has gone up long term too. But that proves nothing. It is not a proven causal relationship. One of the first things you learn in statistics is that correlation is not causation. And there is none of the smooth relationship that you would expect of a causal relationship. Both temperatures and CO2 went up in fits and starts but they were not the same fits and starts. The precise effects on temperature that CO2 levels are supposed to produce were not produced. CO2 molecules don't have a little brain in them that says "I will stop reflecting heat down for a few years and then start up again". Their action (if any) is entirely passive. Theoretically, the effect of added CO2 in the atmosphere should be instant. It allegedly works by bouncing electromagnetic radiation around and electromagnetic radiation moves at the speed of light. But there has been no instant effect. Temperature can stay plateaued for many years (e.g. 1945 to 1975) while CO2 levels climb. So there is clearly no causal link between the two. One could argue that there are one or two things -- mainly volcanoes and the Ninos -- that upset the relationship but there are not exceptions ALL the time. Most of the time a precise 1 to 1 connection should be visible. It isn't, far from it. You should be able to read one from the other. You can't.

Warmists depend heavily on ice cores for their figures about the atmosphere of the past. But measuring the deep past through ice cores is a very shaky enterprise, which almost certainly takes insufficient account of compression effects. The apparently stable CO2 level of 280ppm during the Holocene could in fact be entirely an artifact of compression at the deeper levels of the ice cores. . Perhaps the gas content of an ice layer approaches a low asymptote under pressure. Dr Zbigniew Jaworowski's criticisms of the assumed reliability of ice core measurements are of course well known. And he studied them for over 30 years.

The world's first "Green" party was the Nazi party -- and Greenies are just as Fascist today in their endeavours to dictate to us all and in their attempts to suppress dissent from their claims.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Warmism is a powerful religion that aims to control most of our lives. It is nearly as powerful as the Catholic Church once was

Believing in global warming has become a sign of virtue. Strange in a skeptical era. There is clearly a need for faith

Climate change is the religion of people who think they're too smart for religion

Some advice from the Buddha that the Green/Left would do well to think about: "Three things cannot be long hidden: The Sun, The Moon and The Truth"

Leftists have faith that warming will come back some day. And they mock Christians for believing in the second coming of Christ! They obviously need religion

Global warming has in fact been a religious doctrine for over a century. Even Charles Taze Russell, the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses, believed in it

A rosary for the church of global warming (Formerly the Catholic church): "Hail warming, full of grace, blessed art thou among climates and blessed is the fruit of thy womb panic"

Pope Francis is to the Catholic church what Obama is to America -- a mistake, a fool and a wrecker

Global warming is the predominant Leftist lie of the 21st century. No other lie is so influential. The runner up lie is: "Islam is a religion of peace". Both are rankly absurd.

"When it comes to alarmism, we’re all deniers; when it comes to climate change, none of us are" -- Dick Lindzen

The EPA does everything it can get away with to shaft America and Americans

Cromwell's famous plea: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken" was ignored by those to whom it was addressed -- to their great woe. Warmists too will not consider that they may be wrong ..... "Bowels" was a metaphor for compassion in those days

Inorganic Origin of Petroleum: "The theory of Inorganic Origin of Petroleum (synonyms: abiogenic, abiotic, abyssal, endogenous, juvenile, mineral, primordial) states that petroleum and natural gas was formed by non-biological processes deep in the Earth, crust and mantle. This contradicts the traditional view that the oil would be a "fossil fuel" produced by remnants of ancient organisms. Oil is a hydrocarbon mixture in which a major constituent is methane CH4 (a molecule composed of one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms). Occurrence of methane is common in Earth's interior and in space. The inorganic theory contrasts with the ideas that posit exhaustion of oil (Peak Oil), which assumes that the oil would be formed from biological processes and thus would occur only in small quantities and sets, tending to exhaust. Some oil drilling now goes 7 miles down, miles below any fossil layers

As the Italian chemist Primo Levi reflected in Auschwitz, carbon is ‘the only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great expense of energy, and for life on Earth (the only one we know so far) precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element of living substance.’ The chemistry of carbon (2) gives it a unique versatility, not just in the artificial world, but also, and above all, in the animal, vegetable and – speak it loud! – human kingdoms.

David Archibald: "The more carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere, the better life on Earth will be for human beings and all other living things."

Fossil fuels are 100% organic, are made with solar energy, and when burned produce mostly CO2 and H2O, the 2 most important foods for life.

Warmists claim that the "hiatus" in global warming that began around 1998 was caused by the oceans suddenly gobbling up all the heat coming from above. Changes in the heat content of the oceans are barely measurable but the ARGO bathythermographs seem to show the oceans warming not from above but from below

Consensus: As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.'

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough - Michael Crichton

Bertrand Russell knew about consensus: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman

"I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem -- Christopher Hitchens

"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it" -- H L Mencken

'Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action' -- Goethe

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” -- Voltaire

Lord Salisbury: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe."

Calvin Coolidge said, "If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you." He could have been talking about Warmists.

Some advice from long ago for Warmists: "If ifs and ans were pots and pans,there'd be no room for tinkers". It's a nursery rhyme harking back to Middle English times when "an" could mean "if". Tinkers were semi-skilled itinerant workers who fixed holes and handles in pots and pans -- which were valuable household items for most of our history. Warmists are very big on "ifs", mays", "might" etc. But all sorts of things "may" happen, including global cooling

There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. - Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613-1680)

"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" -- William of Occam

Was Paracelsus a 16th century libertarian? His motto was: "Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest" which means "Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself." He was certainly a rebel in his rejection of authority and his reliance on observable facts and is as such one of the founders of modern medicine

"In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland). No prizes for guessing how global warming skepticism is normally responded to.

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." -- Thomas H. Huxley

Time was, people warning the world "Repent - the end is nigh!" were snickered at as fruitcakes. Now they own the media and run the schools.

"One of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world" -- George Orwell, 1943 in Can Socialists Be Happy?

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts -- Bertrand Russell

“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” -- John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001

The closer science looks at the real world processes involved in climate regulation the more absurd the IPCC's computer driven fairy tale appears. Instead of blithely modeling climate based on hunches and suppositions, climate scientists would be better off abandoning their ivory towers and actually measuring what happens in the real world.' -- Doug L Hoffman

Something no Warmist could take on board: "Knuth once warned a correspondent, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Prof. Donald Knuth, whom some regard as the world's smartest man

"To be green is to be irrational, misanthropic and morally defective. They are the barbarians at the gate we have to stand against" -- Rich Kozlovich

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.“ – Timothy Wirth,
President of the UN Foundation

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)

Leftists generally and Warmists in particular very commonly ascribe disagreement with their ideas to their opponent being "in the pay" of someone else, usually "Big Oil", without troubling themselves to provide any proof of that assertion. They are so certain that they are right that that seems to be the only reasonable explanation for opposition to them. They thus reveal themselves as the ultimate bigots -- people with fixed and rigid ideas.

ABOUT:

This is one of TWO skeptical blogs that I update daily. During my research career as a social scientist, I was appalled at how much writing in my field was scientifically lacking -- and I often said so in detail in the many academic journal articles I had published in that field. I eventually gave up social science research, however, because no data ever seemed to change the views of its practitioners. I hoped that such obtuseness was confined to the social scientists but now that I have shifted my attention to health related science and climate related science, I find the same impermeability to facts and logic. Hence this blog and my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog. I may add that I did not come to either health or environmental research entirely without credentials. I had several academic papers published in both fields during my social science research career

Update: After 8 years of confronting the frankly childish standard of reasoning that pervades the medical journals, I have given up. I have put the blog into hibernation. In extreme cases I may put up here some of the more egregious examples of medical "wisdom" that I encounter. Greenies and food freaks seem to be largely coterminous. My regular bacon & egg breakfasts would certainly offend both -- if only because of the resultant methane output

Since my academic background is in the social sciences, it is reasonable to ask what a social scientist is doing talking about global warming. My view is that my expertise is the most relevant of all. It seems clear to me from what you will see on this blog that belief in global warming is very poorly explained by history, chemistry, physics or statistics.

Warmism is prophecy, not science. Science cannot foretell the future. Science can make very accurate predictions based on known regularities in nature (e.g. predicting the orbits of the inner planets) but Warmism is the exact opposite of that. It predicts a DEPARTURE from the known regularities of nature. If we go by the regularities of nature, we are on the brink of an ice age.

And from a philosophy of science viewpoint, far from being "the science", Warmism is not even an attempt at a factual statement, let alone being science. It is not a meaningful statement about the world. Why? Because it is unfalsifiable -- making it a religious, not a scientific statement. To be a scientific statement, there would have to be some conceivable event that disproved it -- but there appears to be none. ANY event is hailed by Warmists as proving their contentions. Only if Warmists were able to specify some fact or event that would disprove their theory would it have any claim to being a scientific statement. So the explanation for Warmist beliefs has to be primarily a psychological and political one -- which makes it my field

And, after all, Al Gore's academic qualifications are in social science also -- albeit very pissant qualifications.

A "geriatric" revolt: The scientists who reject Warmism tend to be OLD! Your present blogger is one of those. There are tremendous pressures to conformity in academe and the generally Leftist orientation of academe tends to pressure everyone within it to agree to ideas that suit the Left. And Warmism is certainly one of those ideas. So old guys are the only ones who can AFFORD to declare the Warmists to be unclothed. They either have their careers well-established (with tenure) or have reached financial independence (retirement) and so can afford to call it like they see it. In general, seniors in society today are not remotely as helpful to younger people as they once were. But their opposition to the Warmist hysteria will one day show that seniors are not completely irrelevant after all. Experience does count (we have seen many such hysterias in the past and we have a broader base of knowledge to call on) and our independence is certainly an enormous strength. Some of us are already dead. (Reid Bryson and John Daly are particularly mourned) and some of us are very senior indeed (e.g. Bill Gray and Vince Gray) but the revolt we have fostered is ever growing so we have not labored in vain.

Jimmy Carter Classic Quote from 1977: "Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.

SOME POINTS TO PONDER:

Today’s environmental movement is the current manifestation of the totalitarian impulse. It is ironic that the same people who condemn the black or brown shirts of the pre WW2 period are blind to the current manifestation simply because the shirts are green.

Climate is just the sum of weather. So if you cannot forecast the weather a month in advance, you will not be able to forecast the climate 50 years in advance. And official meteorologists such as Britain's Met Office and Australia's BOM, are very poor forecasters of weather. The Met office has in fact given up on making seasonal forecasts because they have so often got such forecasts embarrassingly wrong. Their global-warming-powered "models" just did not deliver

Another 97%: Following the death of an older brother in a car crash in 1994, Bashar Al Assad became heir apparent; and after his father died in June 2000, he took office as President of Syria with a startling 97 per cent of the vote.

Hearing a Government Funded Scientist say let me tell you the truth, is like hearing a Used Car Salesman saying let me tell you the truth.

A strange Green/Left conceit: They seem to think (e.g. here) that no-one should spend money opposing them and that conservative donors must not support the election campaigns of Congressmen they agree with

David Brower, founder Sierra Club: “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license"

After three exceptionally cold winters in the Northern hemisphere, the Warmists are chanting: "Warming causes cold". Even if we give that a pass for logic, it still inspires the question: "Well, what are we worried about"? Cold is not going to melt the icecaps is it?"

It's a central (but unproven) assumption of the Warmist "models" that clouds cause warming. Odd that it seems to cool the temperature down when clouds appear overhead!

To make out that the essentially trivial warming of the last 150 years poses some sort of threat, Warmists postulate positive feedbacks that might cut in to make the warming accelerate in the near future. Amid their theories about feedbacks, however, they ignore the one feedback that is no theory: The reaction of plants to CO2. Plants gobble up CO2 and the more CO2 there is the more plants will flourish and hence gobble up yet more CO2. And the increasing crop yields of recent years show that plantlife is already flourishing more. The recent rise in CO2 will therefore soon be gobbled up and will no longer be around to bother anyone. Plants provide a huge NEGATIVE feedback in response to increases in atmospheric CO2

Every green plant around us is made out of carbon dioxide that the plant has grabbed out of the atmosphere. That the plant can get its carbon from such a trace gas is one of the miracles of life. It admittedly uses the huge power of the sun to accomplish such a vast filtrative task but the fact that a dumb plant can harness the power of the sun so effectively is also a wonder. We live on a rather improbable planet. If a science fiction writer elsewhere in the universe described a world like ours he might well be ridiculed for making up such an implausible tale.

Greenies are the sand in the gears of modern civilization -- and they intend to be.

The Greenie message is entirely emotional and devoid of all logic. They say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level rise. Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which NOBODY is predicting. The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees. So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars? And the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of Arctic melting. That the melting of floating ice does not raise the water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Yet at the opening of 2011 we find the following unashamed lying by James Hansen: "We will lose all the ice in the polar ice cap in a couple of decades". Sadly, what the Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.

The repeated refusal of Warmist "scientists" to make their raw data available to critics is such a breach of scientific protocol that it amounts to a confession in itself. Note, for instance Phil Jones' Feb 21, 2005 response to Warwick Hughes' request for his raw climate data: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" Looking for things that might be wrong with a given conclusion is of course central to science. But Warmism cannot survive such scrutiny. So even after "Climategate", the secrecy goes on.

Most Greenie causes are at best distractions from real environmental concerns (such as land degradation) and are more motivated by a hatred of people than by any care for the environment

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices. -- Prof. P. Stott

The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to admit they're really Reds. So Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the date of Earth Day. Even a moderate politician like Al Gore has been clear as to what is needed. In "Earth in the Balance", he wrote that saving the planet would require a "wrenching transformation of society".

For centuries there was a scientific consensus which said that fire was explained by the release of an invisible element called phlogiston. That theory is universally ridiculed today. Global warming is the new phlogiston. Though, now that we know how deliberate the hoax has been, it might be more accurate to call global warming the New Piltdown Man. The Piltdown hoax took 40 years to unwind. I wonder....

Motives: Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Policies: The only underlying theme that makes sense of all Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." See here for many more examples of prominent Greenies saying how much and how furiously they hate you.

After fighting a 70 year war to destroy red communism we face another life-or-death struggle in the 21st century against green communism.

The conventional wisdom of the day is often spectacularly wrong. The most popular and successful opera of all time is undoubtedly "Carmen" by Georges Bizet. Yet it was much criticized when first performed and the unfortunate Bizet died believing that it was a flop. Similarly, when the most iconic piece of 20th century music was first performed in 1913-- Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- half the audience walked out. Those of us who defy the conventional wisdom about climate are actually better off than that. Unlike Bizet and Stravinsky in 1913, we KNOW that we will eventually be vindicated -- because all that supports Warmism is a crumbling edifice of guesswork ("models").

Al Gore won a political prize for an alleged work of science. That rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Jim Hansen and his twin

Getting rich and famous through alarmism: Al Gore is well-known but note also James Hansen. He has for decades been a senior, presumably well-paid, employee at NASA. In 2001 he was the recipient of a $250,000 Heinz Award. In 2007 Time magazine designated him a Hero of the Environment. That same year he pocketed one-third of a $1 million Dan David Prize. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Science presented him with its Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. In 2010 he landed a $100,000 Sophie Prize. He pulled in a total of $1.2 million in 2010. Not bad for a government bureaucrat.

See the original global Warmist in action here: "The icecaps are melting and all world is drowning to wash away the sin"

I am not a global warming skeptic nor am I a global warming denier. I am a global warming atheist. I don't believe one bit of it. That the earth's climate changes is undeniable. Only ignoramuses believe that climate stability is normal. But I see NO evidence to say that mankind has had anything to do with any of the changes observed -- and much evidence against that claim.

Seeing that we are all made of carbon, the time will come when people will look back on the carbon phobia of the early 21st century as too incredible to be believed

Meanwhile, however, let me venture a tentative prophecy. Prophecies are almost always wrong but here goes: Given the common hatred of carbon (Warmists) and salt (Food freaks) and given the fact that we are all made of carbon, salt, water and calcium (with a few additives), I am going to prophecy that at some time in the future a hatred of nitrogen will emerge. Why? Because most of the air that we breathe is nitrogen. We live at the bottom of a nitrogen sea. Logical to hate nitrogen? NO. But probable: Maybe. The Green/Left is mad enough. After all, nitrogen is a CHEMICAL -- and we can't have that!

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) must have foreseen Global Warmism. He said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some belief in global warming?

For many people, global warming seems to have taken the place of "The Jews" -- a convenient but false explanation for any disliked event. Prof. Brignell has some examples.

Global warming skeptics are real party-poopers. It's so wonderful to believe that you have a mission to save the world.

There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist instinct") in many people that causes them to delight in going without material comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such people -- with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example. Many Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that instinct too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious committments they have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them to live in an ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them to press on us all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".

The claim that oil is a fossil fuel is another great myth and folly of the age. They are now finding oil at around seven MILES beneath the sea bed -- which is incomparably further down than any known fossil. The abiotic oil theory is not as yet well enough developed to generate useful predictions but that is also true of fossil fuel theory

Medieval Warm Period: Recent climatological data assembled from around the world using different proxies attest to the presence of both the MWP and the LIA in the following locations: the Sargasso Sea, West Africa, Kenya, Peru, Japan, Tasmania, South Africa, Idaho, Argentina, and California. These events were clearly world-wide and in most locations the peak temperatures during the MWP were higher than current temperatures.

Both radioactive and stable carbon isotopes show that the real atmospheric CO2 residence time (lifetime) is only about 5 years, and that the amount of fossil-fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is
maximum 4%.

How 'GREEN' is the FOOTPRINT of a WIND TURBINE? 45 tons of rebar and 630 cubic yards of concrete

Green/Left denial of the facts explained: "Rejection lies in this, that when the light came into the world men preferred darkness to light; preferred it, because their doings were evil. Anyone who acts shamefully hates the light, will not come into the light, for fear that his doings will be found out. Whereas the man whose life is true comes to the light" John 3:19-21 (Knox)

Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise reported by the U.N. "experts" for the entire 20th century (a rise so small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally without instruments) shows, if anything, that the 20th century was a time of exceptional temperature stability.

Recent NASA figures tell us that there was NO warming trend in the USA during the 20th century. If global warming is occurring, how come it forgot the USA?

Warmists say that the revised NASA figures do not matter because they cover only the USA -- and the rest of the world is warming nicely. But it is not. There has NEVER been any evidence that the Southern hemisphere is warming. See here. So the warming pattern sure is looking moth-eaten.

The latest scare is the possible effect of extra CO2 on the world’s oceans, because more CO2 lowers the pH of seawater. While it is claimed that this makes the water more acidic, this is misleading. Since seawater has a pH around 8.1, it will take an awful lot of CO2 it to even make the water neutral (pH=7), let alone acidic (pH less than 7).

In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility. Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates. No comprehensive, reliable measurement of worldwide oceanic acid/base balance has ever been carried out: therefore, there is no observational basis for the computer models' guess that acidification of 0.1 pH units has occurred in recent decades.

The chaos theory people have told us for years that the air movement from a single butterfly's wing in Brazil can cause an unforeseen change in our weather here. Now we are told that climate experts can "model" the input of zillions of such incalculable variables over periods of decades to accurately forecast global warming 50 years hence. Give us all a break!

Scientists have politics too -- sometimes extreme politics. Read this: "This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism... I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child." -- Albert Einstein

The Lockwood & Froehlich paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even have been the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and very detailed critiques here and here and here for more on the Lockwood paper and its weaknesses.

As the Greenies are now learning, even strong statistical correlations may disappear if a longer time series is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added." So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. In the Greenie case, the correlation between CO2 rise and global temperature rise stopped in 1998 -- but that could have been foreseen if measurements taken in the first half of the 20th century had been considered.

Greenie-approved sources of electricity (windmills and solar cells) require heavy government subsidies to be competitive with normal electricity generators so a Dutch word for Greenie power seems graphic to me: "subsidieslurpers" (subsidy gobblers)

Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)

NOTE: The archives provided by blogspot below are rather inconvenient. They break each month up into small bits. If you want to scan whole months at a time, the backup archives will suit better. See here or here .....